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Dawn McGuire Page 2 Love and Revenge
Mom writes in her will that if anybody
fights over stuff it all goes to the dogs
at the Keller County Shelter
Mac and I, we don’t fight
not that we want to deprive the coon hounds
too old to go squirrel hunting
or the overstimulated pit bull mixes
dropped through the night slot
when the new baby arrives
But at the millennial end of the decline
from pre-famine Ireland to post-industrial Appalachia
as the number one cash crop devolved from moonshine
to methamphetamine and the body count from speed and oxycontin
increased to where they had to bring an embalmer in
from Lexington to help out
Mac and I got out
and now neither one of us is willing to fight
Gray Granny’s pie safe
go ahead and take it. No, you
Whatever ends up beside our name is strapped onto the van
without comment or complaint
Mac gets the mahogany dining table, seats ten, fine with me
He was still years from being born the time
Daddy smashed a fifth of gin against it
and gashed the grain down its whole length
and Mom hurled a skillet at his head
while I, tilting sideways in my amniotic sac
was still believing I could get there
in time
On the Usefulness of the Parts There's a sociopathic streak on my father's side which I try to put to good use, as when I presented the made-up letter from the made-up Dean to Sir John Something at the British Library. I was in my best clothes, pressed jeans and tattersall, shined combat boots that sunk into the Ardabil carpet sent by the Shah of Oman. A cooperative spike of light from the window gleamed at the gold seal. I had steamed it off a financial aid document, glued it to the letter attesting to scholarship far beyond my years, requesting that the Library kindly accommodate my groundbreaking research. I left the office escorted by Sir Something's mousey minion with the key to Special Collections. She stood in a corner, I suppose she thought discreetly, visibly wringing her hands as I took the manuscript. She was curved like a half-parenthesis; I wondered if she'd get a humpback later on. But then I opened the manuscript and forgot her imminent kyphosis. It was a translation of one of the works of Galen, ur-progenitor of scientific method, physician to Marcus Aurelius. He went by what he saw, (once diagnosed the proud, stoic emperor with overindulgence.) The Roman Empire collapsed before his works were translated in Latin, preserved only by Arab scholars through the West’s Dark Age. The particular text--does it matter? Eavesdropping like that on eternity. I was nineteen. I couldn't read a word of Arabic.
But the milky sweet smell of
the vellum, twelve hundred
years, warm as the breath of a suckling calf-- I forgot my family, my failings, my
contingency— this, my only
threshold—
which is how I remember every word.
© Copyright, 2015,
Dawn McGuire. |