Saturday
mornings I surfaced to voices
of children in the other room, then sank again,
slipped into the green and brown algae-bloom
of sleep, the world above growing darker,
the stories fainter, until I couldn’t breathe—
didn’t want to anyway . . . Disappearances:
The way Chaucer’s life ended, no record
of how or where, of funeral or burial.
The way Bierce passed into silence
beyond Chihuahua, or Weldon Kees,
his
empty car at one end of the Golden Gate.
Once, in
a visitor’s center at a women’s prison,
I read a
child’s storybook to inmates,
illustrations
blue and gold cradled in my palms—
a bear,
a mouse—wide-open eyes of lifers
brimming
at the well of story, arms wrapped
around each
other, the dried flower of cheek
against
cheek, the way my sister one day
after
school pressed her face to mine, whispered
the
story of a grimy man who’d followed
her home
on a bicycle, weaving like a drunk
from
street to gutter, muttering his lewd
invitations,
how our father, alarmed,
patrolled
the streets for weeks, searching
for a monster,
she admitted years later,
she’d
created from nothing. Would it surprise
you to
hear she had come to believe her own
story? That for years a man with teeth broken
and
yellow had cycled through her dreams?
Perhaps
you have seen him—as have I.
Today, in a shed behind a church, I sit
at a
splintered table, shovels and hoes
hanging from hooks, voices rising
like golden
fish in a dark pond. I have
surfaced again.
I have come to hear the stories, to
tell
my own, to see if by coming I will
come to.
This poem appears in Golden Fish / Dark Pond , which can be ordered HERE.