USA

bbates+@pitt.edu

Waiting Room
for Anthony

They've taken us apart and reassembled the pieces,
whittled your legs into stumps, given you a new gait.
They've sloshed our hearts with Superstart,
but they couldn't shift the current of our thinking,
make us believe that all of this is OK.
Anything to stay alive, right?

Some transformer still connects us to those 4th of Julys
when the hammock of night slung its black belly from the stars,
and our families flitted like fireflies in my backyard.
We circled the great moat of your mother's rum cake,
daring a finger to plumb its depths. My grandfather,
like Baal over the barbecue, roasted pork in his fiery furnace.

Now you and I face to face across the waiting room
of another doctor's office, remember ourselves whole,
barefooted, feeling the grass with our toes,
wading through a minefield of cherry bombs,
Chinese firecrackers going off like Cagney bullets.

Shackled to our bodies, we atone for an afterlife we cannot imagine,
our severed bones thrust like nails through our flesh,
our fuses timed to go off in God's planned staccato.
Maybe our bodies will mercifully diffuse into a million particles,
and we'll slip away, hardly missing each fermented piece,
gently hissing like spent sparklers on the wet grass.

Poem forthcoming in The Comstock Review

Airborne

The B-17s are in town for the Fourth.
Old pilots tour the cockpit,
and there he stands, looking up at the props,
at the blue turret where he sat in front of the gunner
as they flew in formation.

In thick clouds he'd drop under his wingman,
keeping that nose-to-tail separation,
eye on the rotating beacon of his partner's plane.
Then into the clear and over the target,
practicing for a kill that never came.

When his father died, carrying out the cast-iron tub,
his mother called him home,
shooting down his chances for a medal.
They argued over dinner, over wine, over wives
she never got along with.

White-haired, he stares at the cockpit now.
All his hard-edged concentration
strains against the memory of the women
he regaled at the Officers' Club, the feel
of his slick flight jacket, traded
for the papermill's dull crew.

Kites are all he flies on the banks of the Ohio.
There he can escape, become a bird soaring beyond
a plane's broad wing. Wind lifts
his hollow quills, his tail, breaking and steering
over Arizona opening into desert bloom.

Artichokes thrust like scepters from the dirt.
California slides beneath him,
lighthouses trembling on veins of fault,
as he splits from the earth
like the Pacific plate, moving North.


Forthcoming in The Comstock Review

© All Copyright, Marilyn Bates.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.