Cindy King
Ars Poetica
Regrettably, the couple, comfortable with their growing
degree of satisfaction, came upon a large, seemingly friendly wolf
on their evening walk. The man thrust out a well-manicured hand
and grazed its mangy coat with his fingers, feeling something,
a boar bristle brush, maybe, or whiskered cheek, like my father’s,
when he nuzzles it to mine. At the time, the man and woman
were unspooled in a neoteric argument concerning their first
kiss—its cause and effect, who leaned in, how lust
did not necessarily end in love but sometimes marriage—
when the man called out to her. She turned
to see him touch the wolf. It was no tamer than a wasp,
but he coaxed it from the bush and stroked its fur.
They watched to see if it might follow
them up the road to the café or sink back toward
the boredom they fled at home. Dust draped
the early evening light and swirled up around them.
“Regret” is a word that splits my heart.
The wolf must mean something,
just as the couple and my father must mean. Like the man,
I too want to reach down and stroke the animal,
wish to live allegorically, to play a part in this fable.
I want to run my fingers along its back,
brush those steel strings, until they howl at me. I need
to know how my father spent his last days without eating
my mother’s meatloaf and mashed potatoes.
“In which parts of your body did you feel pain,”
I want to ask.
I was tasked with delivering mourners
from grief by speaking in sunflowers. But in truth,
words are neither seeds nor bullets. In the light one
sees that the dust is poisoned. Furrows of absolute silence,
couples sleeping naked in fields plowed with shame.
The heart makes a lousy instrument. That is to say,
it pumps no fear, no rage until we hear our parents voice it.
They were never quite sure about the wolf afterward,
when they were home. What is was or whether
they even saw it. Perhaps it wasn’t a wolf at all
but a manifestation of mercy. Some creature
not worthy of their attention.
Navigation
I sometimes believe that the breath, blunt-forced from his body,
Had been returned.
Laid out on the collapsible cot,
He begins to move. Beyond ambulance windows,
Dusk joins the sky’s dark pieces,
Inspiring all things to come together.
Tom had a way of connecting, of understanding the whole.
The new moon offers its infant light,
Closing wounds, joining fractured bone.
It restarts his heart and the bright organs sing.
Vessels, veins open for joy. Love restores flesh
To memory’s bare bone: In the black night, stars appear.
How the sheet falls as he rises and passes through double doors.
And still I believe he is on his way home.
Nocturne
after Brigit Pegeen Kelly
All sleep in the daytime. All sleep. Days whir together like fan blades,
the illusion of something solid. And the smell of lilacs faint in the sheets.
Amorous, immodest. Boudoir of odor. Sitting room of scent.
Conservator of things best left unexamined. A pair
of bronze elephants on the shelf that lend no strength
to the book that leans between them. The soft gray book,
like a compendium of loss,
or the books we bring to bed, whose stories
are read to erase other stories. A kind of forgetting.
The dog bawls. All day. No sleep in his gosling suit.
Up and down, up and down. A bright exile, dispossessed.
Like the car idling in the garage. The door is shut
but still the fumes no thicker. And the engine
bleats in the night. No passengers here, but still
the car sounds its horn, makes a merciless noise: a sound
like a long-held threat freed at last from the throat, or the blast
of a rifle fired on a flock of geese at dawn.
Near the school, the lilacs nod in narcotized consensus
then drop like birds as traffic passes through them,
blotting them out. Like an egg swallowed by a rat snake. The car in the garage,
a shell in a chamber. There is no driver here. Though the noise of its engine
is like the sound of a dog growling at his master.
The school is an obsidian dream, an unknowable mountain of shale
with bright spikes in it. Thorns of wakefulness, forest
of teeth, consciousness gnawing at sleep, reshuffling the pages
of the heart’s appendixes. A kind of forgiveness.
All sleep. Muscles twitch. The body ignites
the hooded head. The dog bawls. Is it loss
that does this? Yes, but still we may guess at it
beneath the still shallows of reflection. The car stops. The lilacs tremble
again in stop motion…feathers gray in the pre-dawn light.
Like something a dog buried then exhumed by the driveway.
A short cement path. Singular. Crumbling like the book
on the shelf, collapsed in the grand gesture of the future.