Looking Back: I’m In the Kitchen When I Hear the News

Looking Back: I’m In the Kitchen When I Hear the News

And a shock so primitive even my tongue condenses

into phlegm.  There’s no swallowing it.   I forget how

words form, how they gather like penitents to be

spoken through liquid teeth, lips.  Both are burning posts in fog,

or this thin hall that leads out and off the roof  

of my mouth, down the gutter of my throat that’s only known

all swallowing as easy.  I’ve never once seen anyone

who has choked to death.  Or dropped dead, exhausted.  Or

drowned.  Now, because this is new, it’s something

else: the thick pads of my feet hum and the tips

of my toes!   Oh, they begin to go

numb, a summer (how’s that possible?) frostbite.

And in a space I’ve known better

than the cat I start to fold; in a place where for years

I never stubbed a thing suddenly every table leg, every

door jamb’s my boy’s bat hitting every toe at every pitch.  Dead

drunk on the news of the lake I can’t make it

to the end without falling

into the kitchen sink, and that clay knick-knack

he loved and was playing with this morning tips

over the way I see him now spill out of the boat. Horse

and rider collide with the floor the way he collided with water,

and me too: skirts wide as a mouth yet pleated, slick as factory fish

so that it’s only by some wonder his clay

Remington Bronco doesn’t bust, doesn’t concuss

enough to rupture.  Instead it skuds beneath a highboy we’d meant.

to move to his bedroom.  And it sits there, lost.  It will be flat

on its flank and cheek until next spring when I can finally move

the cabinet when the dust drifts in the cloth-clotted wind,

in the open-behind-me-window wind that lifts winter off

his favorite thing.  And like all of them that went under, I stare

the way the ones on shore could only stare and gape, can’t believe what

they’re seeing will never resurface

rearing, neighing, rider’s arm up, chaps straight out

at the boot never falling off, never falling in

to anything but neck and mane and sky.  Never

water.  Not ever.  Or if water, oh Jesus, because it’s only yards

from shore and all those mothers clutching time

to go home sweaters to their throats aren’t speechless

or dumb.  They’re getting ready to pack the picnic, to get

supper.  Do that load of wash they’d put off.  Uncover

the dough they’d left in the icebox.  Pound it down

to let it rise one more time.