Arsenic Lobster
poetry journal |
Issue Fifteen Winter 2007 |
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Summer Storm, 1963 Penny Dyer It’s June, and the corn has begun to spear; the house smells of matches gone out—wet newspaper and sulfur. Rain ticks in the gutter, reminiscent of a carbine’s clicking, and he remembers, as he examines his hands, another summer, the uneasy island: gray rings of orbiting ships. Smoldering lagoons. A slate sky with nothing written on. That February summer which seemed all wrong, his hands were taut and smooth. They were not at fault. There was the sound of stones skipped across water, a red sluice of one stream into another. Then the rain began. Now, even with the lamp gone out, he can read the fortune in his palms, the lifelines curling around his thumbs, and he wonders: is atonement the longer or shorter? As the days rust, he remembers how his knees worked the ground, the taste of copper its own Eucharist, the monsoon’s baptism. He keeps these wounds in a parcel in his pocket. When it rains, he fingers the frayed creases. Outside the storm pummels the house. The sweat of it spatters the sidewalk, and craters the straight mounds of a black garden. Every flaw the rain finds exhumes a buried root. Tomorrow he will kneel between the furrows, cover again the gentle seedlings, as he ponders the fold of his hands. He considers how easily the tender fall. |