|
1958
by Todd Swift
If there was news it wouldn’t be by telephone
(there wasn’t one) that it would come –
each day doing the work that had to be done;
night giving you brief, less simple hours to lie
alone. Your wife was taken to the far hospital
but nothing was born. You stood, strong,
with farmer’s hands, listening to walls
where a clock did its modest rounds.
You’d seen animals suffering like this,
not someone loved. After three days,
you chose to go home to keep the world
of small hours going, while
she lay, child-round and prolonged:
in pain until blacking out.
They promised to send word
when either one of the two vast promises
life holds (one in either hand) opened:
to come into the light, or go away from it.
You felt her heaviness as your own, as you
went about regular chores: how she,
beautiful, carried your future within her, too –
because of, beyond, your unknowable child;
this binding husbandry unrealized
even at the altar where you’d joined hands.
Now, he comes towards you,
a policeman in the broken dawn;
the sky is nearer dark than not.
Your pail of feed goes out of your grasp,
body leaning against flimsy wire,
the noose of wanting good in your throat.
|
Decision
by Kim Stratford
|