Unusually, she woke in the middle hours.
Strange, because normally she'd fall right back
into a comfortable numbness,
but not tonight.
So she imagined effluent-filled, rat-colored
rivers dyed deep ocean blue,
like you'd see from a plane thousands of feet above
in the lapis lazuli sky she never sees in her city life.
Imagined a star-filled night sky, a sparkling arm of Milky Way.
Holdovers from the Paleolithic Era,
our greatest hits to calm ourselves,
to beat back our modern insomnia that always gnaws.
But tonight, nothing works,
not the buffeting winds outside,
nor the sure pulse of blood beating at her temples
scream at the Piggly Wiggly – what? – ten years ago now?
We thought she’d lost her marbles, but she’d lost her baby instead.
She was crying in Produce, shrieking in Dairy.
In Frozen Foods, positively apoplectic.
Having somewhere else to go, we quit that Louisiana backwater,
but some nights late I swear I still hear that woman scream and wonder:
did she later find her baby in the arms of a well-meaning friend?
Or was it instead found dead, head down in a ditch, its limp
and swollen form bobbing next to the molten holes of crawdads?
Or was the baby stolen?
That would be a blessing, right?
How many times has the girl passed her mother on the street,
sold pralines at her door, brushed within inches of her?
Abuzz
Our world is abuzz with velvet sounds we cannot hear
and pulsing colors we cannot begin to see.
In a field of snow, all we see is white, white and more white.
Hungry reindeers, though, can spot their favorite snack, lichens,
a fungus plus algae combo, because it traps UV light we can't see.
And after their snack, this evolutionary gift keeps giving.
They spot wolves ahead and steer clear because
absorbed in the wolves' fur is that same UV light.
Our world is abuzz with velvet sounds we cannot hear
and pulsing colors we cannot begin to see.
In fall, millions of birds migrate every night.
While we, enclosed, stream movies, shop with our fingertips,
tediously check our phones, a swallow, no bigger than a butterknife,
weighing less than a pair of shoes, navigates over our heads in the dark –
cross-countries, cross-continents without GPS. Because their eyes, not ours,
have cryptochrome 4, a protein that allows them to see magnetic fields.
So we are no masters of this world,
but handicapped, limited, weak,
but lethal.
A Thought
A thought popped into his head.
Maybe he should just slam the brakes.
Hard, really hard.
His cheating, soon-to-be ex-girlfriend's car
would spin off the rain-slick asphalt
then barrel through the barbed wire fence
that ran along the farm to market,
your basic Texas two-lane unlit blacktop.
They'd end up sunk in a muddy field
where white egrets perched on a herd
of Charolais cattle would stare at them
with their beady, unsentimental cattle egret eyes.
On the other hand, maybe he should
knead the steering wheels grips, take a breath,
maybe more, and, why not? -- accept his rejection.
This Palpable Absence
The space on the floor where she lay
near the bathroom that I was always
or almost always careful to step over.
Today, there's no need now that she's ashes.
Almost 30 years of a dog or dogs inhabiting my house.
But today, only myself and my wife.
Too damn quiet! I miss the whisper
of paws on the wood floor.
`` She aged. Got sick. Stopped wanting
to go for the walks she always loved.
Stopped eating, even her favorite – chicken and rice.
We took her to the vet, and now she is gone.
It is like what I can only imagine
a phantom limb is like.
You see, I keep thinking she is still in her usual spots.
I even step over them as if she were there.
And when I leave home, I want to tell her
to be good while we're gone. And when I come home,
I fully expect she will pull herself up off her rug to greet us,
her little stub tail wagging as it once always did.
Ken Wheatcroft-Pardue, a retired high school English and ESL teacher, lives in beautiful Fort Worth, Texas. He is an essayist, fiction writer, and poet. Ken has had poems published in Concho River Review, The Texas Observer, Borderlands, California Quarterly, Book of Matches Literary Review, Nerve Cowboy, Red Eft Review, and two anthologies of Texas poetry.
No comments:
Post a Comment