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.