Spiral Fugue
Michael Lauchlan 1. Between ball fields and tennis courts-- shuffleboard--old guys in plaids bicker in Yiddish, Italian, or some branch of English, laughing, falling silent. Where they come from I don’t ask. Hustling past, I fall into a hole and emerge as grandfather, bald, drifty, with stories and a tendency to ramble. 2. I speak to my doctor. He says we see a lot of this and asks about my bowels and my sleep (both lousy), looks into a computer and adjusts my script. 3. Five, in our bare backyard, I stare through a fence at grandpa in his garden amid tomato plants, zucchini, flowers I could never name. His left arm ruined in the mines, his right indefatigable, he’d left a family in the old world, meant to return, perhaps, but landed here, instead. 4. We rush from the back door to kiss in the downpour. I see you only by lightning. When our lips part, we are roaring, fulgent, slowly turning in the storm 5. Cancer will take Kit in a month. Today she rubs my shoulders, as we chat; then she’s off to greet Salvadorans she’ll finagle into Canada. Radiant and twenty, she tucked red hair into a wimple and left home to teach kids in the Andes. At her funeral I’ll see snaps. 6. Not fighting, I find myself in the middle of a fight, one boy with a cue stick, another with a blade, one with balled fists. They wheel around me and we spill out into the street. We might be spinning still, our own tiny planet, but one more boy enters the fray, drags off his bareknuckle friend, leaves the others to me. 7. They’d known cotton fields, the old men--also death trains, steerage, and boxcars before auto plants and small apartments near a park. I swear they were here and now they’re gone. |
About the author:
Lauchlan’s poems have landed in many publications including New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, Southword, The Dark Horse, Tar River Poetry, Harpur Palate, and The Cortland Review. His most recent collection is Trumbull Ave., from WSU Press. |