That morning, without prayer or warning, we met
the cops, a blood clot
shaped like a galaxy
expanding on the mattress.
Fifty years, and I’ve been asking why the memory
 
seeps back these last months. I was fourteen, still
an altar boy. Joe
had driven me to the cabin on church property.
A bookish jock with a Jersey slur,
he’d talk poems  
 
with me in his parish study. These days, the news  
routs such calm.
That day, Joe was to help the widow
with her faraway smile
hunt up combs and brushes to take back
 
to her numb life. They'd already cleared the body. Surely
the church would give her a hand,
find a new place to rest
her look-away head. How would she go on
now that her drunk son had blown
 
large gauge through her old man? We do our best
to reset the gyroscope.
Last month as I marched crosstown in resistant synch
with thousands, a thin young man
on the sidewalk, dressed in black leather, a large safety
 
pin pierced through his cheek, pointed a gunned finger
at me, his fist and sleeve painted bright red
in the style of splashed blood.
Not long ago my reveries
wove themselves into the questions we ask of stars,
 
answers enfolded in the fissures between visible matter
and its empty double.
Seems like such indulgence now…
Maybe Joe intended my exit
from innocence. Maybe
 
he was preparing for days when the air collapsed in
on all of us, poems gone
quiet while pistols stood loaded
in the back rooms of suburban homes
till sons blew bullets
 
through school windows we’d once stared from.
Maybe his genius
was prescience.
—He left the priesthood to marry
long before the old conflagrations renewed. Maybe
 
down deep he knew he’d die in a chair
reading deChardin
while his wife and child chose plums at the local stand.  
Who knows? I’m left
with an image that rose from the sheets decades ago
 
as I stood witless in blood-stale air: a nodding
teenage boy, a shotgun borne
above his head in victory,
the drunken father sent silent at last.
—You’d think we’d been warned.

Kevin Clark

< BACK | NEXT >

TABLE OF CONTENTS