The Innisfree Poetry Journal
www.innisfreepoetry.org
by John Hoppenthaler
WHEN RACHEL'S FATHER MOVED AWAY
a week ago, she began to sing and still hasn't stopped. I hear her now, trilling through leaves, perched high in the farthest crook of the apple tree. Her mother's concerned. "Rachel doesn't sing well," she jokes, forcing a grin. "It's hard hearing her lullabies falling asleep at night, and what about school? Maybe it's just a phase." Walking over to the gnarled trunk, She grabs hold of each end of a board he'd nailed there to serve as a ladder, peers through the branches. "Rach, sweetie, how about a sandwich?" But Rachel isn't hungry. Suddenly much younger, she's into a sing-a-long learned years ago from Barney, that lavender dinosaur on TV: "I love you, you love me," she chants, picks a big, green apple. She takes a bite, and it's bitter; then, she takes another.
NYACK, NY, 1/29/02
The temperature holds near seventy; a shirt-sleeved crowd gathers at Memorial Park to consider the river, toss aloft scraps to gulls in mid-afternoon. The men of Cool Breeze Mechanical take a long lunch. No desperation calls for heat today or air, they munch pizza at leisure, and prepare for summer's arrival. Local kids are shooting hoops, and every swing is swinging
in the playground as two guitar strummers huddle on a picnic table and stumble through their skittery repertoires. Even Nickel Joe stops poking for bottles awhile to grin. I've come to wash away some days I regret in brackish water. Something awkward gnaws at the phoenix heart that trembles my chest. Why ever blessed in the aftermath, that spiny wreath of last year I'll toss away as I can. The black lab chases the Frisbee, comes back, chases
the Frisbee, comes back—no end, it seems, to his enthusiasm, his devotion. And now lovers have come to the quiet gazebo to whisper. On New Year's Eve, I watched fireworks set this skyline ablaze. I stood outside the bar in blue cold with regulars, cradled a delicate flute of bubbles in my fingers. We were thinking of towers, and how change had come. We wished together it meant an early spring.
CROP DUSTER
Afternoons they often wandered through malls, and he held in his hands small objects of growing desire. One time, a purple Duncan Yo-Yo, then a plastic revolver that spat diaphanous
streams of tap water. Today, he might have chosen the yellow Tonka dump truck or screaming red fire engine, but instead picked the crop duster because battery-powered propellers spun at the flick
of his finger. For months now, wanting to keep him in a safer place than home, his grandmother has taken the child away each time her only son’s anger scorched the thin fabric of his marriage–always it seemed just
as it had been ironed again to threadbare smoothness. She sips cherry Coke while he sprawls over simple patterns sewn into her new Persian rug. When has it been easier to love one’s own
hidden scars? The boy grown bored, tired flaying back room air with his toy, begins to complain, says the plane just goes and goes but never takes off. He wants to see it fly.
ORDER TO GO
Down on Main Street, the guy who owns Pizza Boutique has bought out River Antiques to open a family restaurant. Word in town has it that he's got designs on Molly's, which would rankle me—man doesn't smile, never acknowledges my desire: "easy on the cheese." Today I order a pie with grilled veggies, "easy on the cheese," head to Molly's for a quick pop, maybe three. The barstool feels fine, like my ass tethers one world to another, one life to hundreds who've swivelled this seat, knocked back smoky shot glasses of bourbon, felt heat course into their flabby but always-hungry stomachs. Molly's sympathetic, still easy on my eyes, and my ass is reluctant; as I spin from the perch, lurch for the door, it puckers up in an effort at tightness, tries mightily to overcome the gravity of mozzarella.
Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication
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