His Favourite
Animal
My
four-year-old son flutters his wrists,
dainty
and light, skips from one kitchen
floor
tile to the next, “they’re petals, Dad!”
he
squeals balancing on one socked foot, a
butterfly
paper cut-out he had clearly cut and
coloured
in Crayola-crafted scribblings of oranges
yellows,
and reds, clutched in a sweaty grip
like
the flaccid rope alongside a swinging
bridge:
monarchs, viceroys, admirals, he tells
me
everything he learned at day care
including
the “proboscis” demonstrated by
tongue
flailing and giggles, but everything
is
transitory; butterflies live for four weeks,
and
during a recent cleaning purge,
the
crumpled cut-out found a black
contractor
bag, a choice my son made in spite
of
my crisis of time’s passing. He moves on,
discovers
value in the ever-evolving present
like
the legacy of old things my mother gives
me
at the conclusion of each visit: a tattered copy
of
The Old Curiosity Shop, worthless.
“Look
inside,”
she said. “At the inscription, you see?”
“To Evie—Merry Christmas, 1922” in
careful
longhand.
I worry about her, want to proclaim
the
obvious without insult. I tell her
that’s
not me. She smiles and explains that
it
was someone, and for an iron-mouthed
moment,
my son floats backwards as if tethered,
and
folds back into a cocoon to relive
everything
again, like a God.
Natural World
The
neighbour is out mowing again,
a
throbbing, rhythmic rumble
like
the hum of a chest freezer.
Crabgrass
has invaded the sandbox,
germinated
from beneath its surface
perhaps
from a dog turd or crushed
blueberry
dropped from my three-year-old
son’s
fingers. Someday, I think,
the
wasps will return
on
instinct like salmon looking
to
mate, an instinct, a rite of passage.
Maybe—they
could complete
their
nest, perhaps the one inside
the
outlet cover, or the one we uncovered
in
the woodshed. I remember—with
gloved
hands I sprayed a foamy chemical
into
its bulbous cylindrical hole like
an
insemination, an explosion
of
panic, static buzzing, a tardy
alarm
for a tornado in the night.
Eventually,
black bodies oozed out,
tumbling
and caked in whiteness
like
shaving cream: threat neutralized in
the
springtime rains, snowmelt,
the
waterpark of our sloped driveway
home
to wriggling worms like
a
minefield. I tell my son “the floor
is
lava” and he freezes then hopscotches
from
empty space to empty space
as
drizzle tickles his blue slicker.
It’s
a familiar game but each step
crushes
life and his ignorance
shields
him from all of that. All of this
is
for him. Who cares about
dandelions
when real things can
get
you? The mowing stops. The job
is
done. The sun—there’s a tick
crawling
on my leg.
Summoning Spirits
Dilapidated
worlds, abandoned
houses
mimic life as interim holiday
mausolea,
tenebrous symbols
of
the day in which all us kids
wanted
was to be someone or
something
else for a couple
of
hours. But on this night
among
water damage and
derelict
crows’ nests, a shredded
corpse
of a mouse, colourless, faded
7UP
cans tumbling from an overturned
plastic
trash barrel, oscillations of
occasional
sunlight and persistent
neglect,
these homes aren’t haunted,
they’re
just sad, ghosts of themselves.
In
our paltry séance, we hold hands
in
a circle and, if it’s only me, I pray
someone
can make amends
for
this.
Tonight
or
his neck hunched
over
his phone,
looming
and weighty
like
a sad, inebriated
expectation…
I am
begging
him
as
his friend
to
stop the meatless
actions.
“It doesn’t
matter,”
I say. “Nothing
we
can solve tonight,”
but
a yelping dog
on
a frigid, forgotten
back
porch barks
until
it can’t
any
longer because
at
some point,
that
screen door
opens
again, no
matter
what
anyone
says.
Adam Chabot
is the English Department Chair at Kents Hill School, a private, independent
high school located in central Maine. His other poetry has been recently
featured in rough diamond poetry, Magpie Lit, and Selcouth
Station, among others. He can be found on
Twitter @adam_chabot.
No comments:
Post a Comment