The smoldering odor
of dead leaves raked against my stone foundation
tells me it’s 1950 & I’m fishing
cool salamanders out
of a window well. Charcoal-black
with splotches of flesh-pink,
they look like they’ve survived the third-degree
burns featured in my father’s Life
at War. That summer my uncle dropped down
on all fours in the yard, the grown-from-seed
lawn glossy as Easter
grass, & trapped a rabbit
under his hat, I wanted to keep it
out back in a cage I awoke
the next sun-shot morning to find
smeared with guts: a cat. The scene of the crime
marked the spot where a robin froze
so a kid given a Red Ryder gun
for his birthday could squeeze a gold BB
into its thumb-size head. When I confessed,
the word got chanted through the bulldozed farm
country by the Turnbull boys, whose father
I watched a court of law railroad for shooting
the dog harassing his pet fox. His eldest,
a tattooed green Marine, coasted me up
& down the block on his Harley-Davidson
one warm evening after supper, before
going to Korea. Then came the night
I didn’t think I’d live
to see the day-tomorrow—I’d turn seven:
my candle-lit family of three
hugged the southwest corner
of the basement and waited for the white
lightning to nail the oak outside our door
before the wind funneled our house
into the sky. Later I saw
refrigerators lying on their sides
in the mud, too big & fat to get back
on their feet without help, & snapped
power lines crisscrossed the newly paved streets
like black snakes sunning themselves in the mild
aftermath. I went on living
in the breathing spaces
between the lines the growing suburb drew
around me, & today I turn
over this ground to find
the straight & narrow shade-dark rows
seeded with light.
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