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.
