When the Call Came, and After
Cecil Morris


 
The east-bound Union Pacific freight clunking behind his right eye,
steel wheels gathering speed crossing rail joints, and he thinks of spikes
 
and ice picks and the clean, cauterizing sear of lightning flash
and thunder chasing, the great boom inside, the flash from axon
 
to dendrite leaping in his head, the news scorching single path
again, again.  Those words burn all air from his collapsing lungs,
 
blind like the torch's blaze undimmed, and he finds himself not dead,
not crushed under rolling stock or blown to mist by acetylene
 
explosion.  He finds himself on shop floor, on gritty concrete,
an animal crawling, some rabid creature swaying, lurching,
 
gasping like thirteen, the hard grounder driving into his gut,
wild in the infield dirt, his phone gone, his ears a wind tunnel
 
sucking all words from him. Then hands hoisting him, steadying him,
and Jack, his back to him, holding a phone and nodding his head
 
and turning, not meeting his eyes.  Then they put him in a truck
and drive and no one talks, not one question, not one dirty joke.
 
At the hospital, with an engine's endless thrumming in his head,
in a room too white and too small, he tries to hear the doctor's
 
words, but they are motion without sound, like bird wings moving air
and climbing cloudy sky.  He asks again and again, and his wife
 
Marlene sags against his shoulder and weeps in fists of tissues
and repeats, when she speaks at all, the name that bores through his bones,

drill press with worn bit biting at every turn, the high-pitched whine,
and he wishes, God forgive him, that the chaplain there, that font
 
of tissues for whom she asked, would lead her out and comfort her
somewhere anywhere he can't hear, can't feel her quaking by him,
 
feel her shuddering move through him.  The doctor says and says and points
where he must sign and his wife bends double in tears that will not stop,
 
and the chaplain lays her hand on the knots of spine bent and exposed
like knuckles lifting skin in a giant fist, like great rosary
 
beads begging prayers, like rope burning wounds across his scarred palms.
When he bends forward to sign the forms, he closes his eyes and sees
 
his son Phillip a car parted out, organs slick with holy grease
​held gently and turned, inspected, and passed from hand to hand.








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About the Author: Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English---mostly at Roseville High School in Roseville, California. Now he tries writing what he used to try teaching students to read. He has had a handful of poems published in English Journal, California English, Poem, The American Scholar, and other literary magazines.

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