Domestic

My father, the policeman, drove past the prison,
delivering me to my Saturday job on his way to the station.
In there, he said, they’re all murderers. Very quiet,
not what you’d expect. The prison officers
all want to work there, it’s such an easy job.
All the blokes in there murdered their wives.
Wouldn’t say boo to a goose most of them.
Just a one time thing, apparently. They just got pushed
too far and snapped, picked up a knife or a hammer –
it was all over in a moment, too late to take it back.
They confess right away. Some of them
call the police themselves. They’re all in there
together, doing their time, mild little men.

He seemed proud of them: men who had just once
stood up for themselves. How often had my mother
pushed him? How far did she have to go?

Thunder, 1954

Thunderstorms seemed bigger to me
in those days. I lay awake, tucked up in white sheets,
looking toward the bedroom window where my mother
showed me the dance of blue-white fire over clouds.
She had long ago gone back to bed, when my father
came in, quietly, in the spasmodic dark, closing the door
behind him. He sat down and took my small hand
in his big hot palm. You're not frightened, are you? he asked.
I told him truly, No. The storm rebounded from the hills
above our town, with the sound of giants moving furniture.
My father's shoulders hunched. I could smell his sweat.
Your mother's asleep. He wanted talk, but I couldn't
have known what to say. A huge glare, the sky cracking.
Can you smell the cordite?
What's cordite? I asked.
You smell it when they fire the big guns.
He went to the window and looked out into blackness.
As the lightning came and went his arms hugged
his own black silhouette. Go back to sleep, he told me.

Acrophobia at Mile Marker 89

The seven mile bridge rises,
unnecesarily high, water out to Havana
on one side, Biloxi on the other.

The road is four cars wide.
Jersey barriers at the edge
(the slighest touch would tip them).

A heart is a ferris wheel that’s seizing
at the very top.
No way down. No way out.

Above, the paranoid sky
below, bipolar sea,
waiting in its sleek green
hide to catch you

and falling is inevitable.

Dust of spinning wheels
makes coral the clouds,
the bridge is

a white crumbling arc
hanging. Broken

columns sink in submarine clay.
Mind crashes and tumbles.

Someone says
Don’t close your eyes.

Hands clamped to the wheel,
wait to come down in Marathon.

(Poem, later)

It was as if the bank teller could not see me
neither could the two girls speaking
Spanish at the information desk.
I was invisible to the hairdresser
except for my hair. In the mirror
I saw the manicurist, but she didn’t look
up from her client’s cuticles
and the bald man in the gallery
talking on a cellphone to a creditor
only saw my money.

In the over-heated parking lot
Camrys and Cadillacs ignored me
sinking their tires into the tarmac
so did the scarlet striped with yellow
leaves of the croton bushes
and the curbside shopping carts.
If the ospreys on their nest
on the light pole had stopped mating
for a minute they might have seen me.
It was as if I had vanished into
the earth when it was not watching:
in reality, too,
the earth was not watching me.