The Quarry

On a wall of my study a picture
    of a quarry
with high, jagged cliffs like
    the one
my father dove from, just miss-
    ing a floating
pole, he'd told me years later,
    giving me
a wink in the same breath he
    said that
would have been the end of me,
    both
of us laughing in that dim kit-
    chen
despite his drinking himself
    death,
despite the woman who had left,
despite the pockmarks on his
    face
that slowly swallowed him up,
    the black
wings covering him even
as I dialed Lorraine's number
    and
whispered I'd be there with-
    in
the hour, my back turned to
    him
who had given me two of his
    last
four dollars, smoke flowing
    from
his thin lips as he hacked
I would not have to pay
    him back.
 

Even the leaves
couldn't keep him from the drink,
October's first cold fall
of reds and yellows and golds
nothing to him at all
except a safe place to drop,
if it came to that,
as he stumbled back from Boney's Bar,
sometimes making it all the wsay to our door
before giving it up and swaying
into the pile I'd raked
away from the fence
to where I'd judged
he might need it most,
like today, looking out at October
again, him twenty-seven years gone,
my son so much like him down there
in the big yard as he leaps
and swims in leaves
I have to shake my head to see
the blond hair instead of black,
the clear cheek, the faultless eye,
but still the stance is the same,
that one-legged kind of dance
he'd totter miles on
when the cold came
and he knew finally his wife had gone
off to Troy with another dark Irishman,
when the bottles leapt like leaves
from the shelves into his palm-open hands
and stuck there with their little hooks
until he'd emptied them and called for more,
and more came, all autumn long,
as the thermometer dropped
with his dollars and change
on the long walnut bar,
only the wind of the barkeep's hand
waking him for the long walk home
in a draft he felt sneak beneath the turned up collar
and down into his wide-open heart
that turned brilliant red and veined
until it, too, had to stop
hanging on and let fall, let fall
 

They're back again, black pads
raised, shiny claws scratching
the air, teeth clamped on what
I don't want to imagine as I ride
home on narrow Wassergass Road,
ready for the fool to come barreling
around a corner half on my side
of the yellow line, ready to honk
the horn, flick the finger,
to slam on the brakes, if he
stops, get out and fight, I'm that
angry this March, unable to sleep
because the spring peepers are howling
in the pond, the moon so full last night
it turned our bedroom into twilight,
the green glow of the digital
clock's hands like the X-ray
of my wife's chemo'd bones,
the marrow sucked out while
she was as doused, the marrow
injected back and still
she was dead within the year,
her blond hair brushed
in clumps until there was
only skull, the yellow
blue bowls of her eyes
I look for in the rear-view
mirror, waiting for the guy
behind me to push
his luck and get too close.
 

    My Job

    Night Swimming in the Pond

    My Son's Words of Wisdom Cup

    Oval