Mrs. Hill
I am so young that I am still in love
with Battle Creek, Michigan: decoder rings,
submarines powered by baking soda,
whistles that only dogs can hear. Actually,
not even them. Nobody can hear them.
Mrs. Hill from next door is hammering
on our front door shouting, and my father
in his black and gold gangster robe lets her in
trembling and bunched up like a rabbit in snow
pleading, oh I'm so sorry, so sorry,
so sorry, and clutching the neck of her gown
as if she wants to choke herself. He said
he was going to shoot me. He has a shotgun
and he said he was going to shoot me.
I have never heard of such a thing. A man
wanting to shoot his wife. His wife.
I am standing in the center of a room
barefoot on the cold linoleum, and a woman
is crying and being held and soothed
by my mother. Outside, through the open door
my father is holding a shotgun,
and his shadow envelops Mr. Hill,
who bows his head and sobs into his hands.
A line of shadow seems to be moving
across our white fence: hunched-over soldiers
on a death march, or kindly old ladies
in flower hats lugging grocery bags.
At Roman's Salvage tire tubes
are hanging from trees, where we threw them.
In the corner window of Beacon Hardware there's a sign:
WHO HAS 3 OR 4 ROOMS FOR ME. SPEAK NOW.
For some reason Mrs. Hill is wearing mittens.
Closed in a fist, they look like giant raisins.
in the Encyclopedia Britannica Junior
the great Pharoahs are lying in their tombs,
the library of Alexandria is burning.
Somewhere in Cleveland or Kansas City
the Purple Heart my father refused in WWII
is sitting in a Muriel cigar box,
and every V-Day someone named Schwartz
or Jackson gets drunk and takes it out.
In the kitchen now Mrs. Hill is playing
gin rummy with my mother and laughing
in those long shrieks that women have
that make you think they are dying.
I walk into the front yard where moonlight
drips from the fenders of our Pontiac Chieftan.
I take out my dog whistle. Nothing moves.
No one can hear it. Dogs are asleep all over town.
The Death of a Psychic
The obituary in the L.A. Times says that you foresaw
your own death, also a boy, dead, in a storm drain
with the wrong shoes on the wrong feet. Death
became your specialty: a yellow shirt, the flung
corsage near, vaguely, water, the odd detail drawing
squad cars and ambulance to the scene you dreaded.
I imagine nightmares that you woke up to instead
of from, the heavy winter coat of prophecy that hung
from your shoulders any season, especially summer
when mayhem bloomed below a bleeding sun
and dark angels, gorged on smog and heat, unfurled
their wings to wake you gasping in your dampened bed,
again, once more. No theophanies, no "still small voice"
or hovering dove, but only gray, murky hunches
bubbling from the mud of intuition, the sudden starts
and flights of vision, and of course, its shadow, fear.
But to live haunted by the knowledge of a certain year
when you would stumble in your flannel houserobe
through a sunlit kitchen and lie down on cold linoleum
beneath, at last, the wide wings of the present tense.
A Wall Map of Paris
. . . tragend als Strömung das Haupt und die Leier.
Rilke
A night of drinking, dawn is coming on,
my friend's hand falls along a darkening stain
that runs from Vaugirard to Palatine
and west to Rue Cassette. There, he says,
Rilke wrote "The Panther." And that darkness
came from James Wright's head one soggy night
when he drank too much, leaned back into the Seine
and recited verse till dawn. Ohio sunlight
stuns the windowpane, and I'm seeing Paris,
where the morning bronzes cobblestones,
the grates around the chestnut trees, and a man
with a fullback's shoulders and a dancer's tread
whistles a Schubert tune and walks toward
a river like the rivers in his head.
He looks for Villon's ghost at Notre Dame,
recalls Apollinaire, the rain-soaked heart
of sad Verlaine, Rilke at the Dome,
and later a St. Anne's watches the children
learning how to kiss like swans. But on
Pont Neuf, when he gazes deep into the Seine,
the face of a glassworker's son stares back,
and the river that runs through Paris runs
through Ohio past Jimmy Leonard's shack,
the Shreve High Football Stadium, and Kenyon,
where a boy with the memory of a god
and a gift for taking images to heart
translates from a poem about the head
of Orpheus, in a river, singing.
(c) B. H. Fairchild 2002. All rights reserved.
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