Seth Abramson
Forty
Six
Lately I see my house
abused by creepers, all
manner of autumn crocus
understating its case:
we have not lived well.
Lately the children
next door have taken up
kites, all manner of boxes
and unblinking dragons.
I see their red orbits
pass
overhead, round and
round and ever upward.
I want to shoot them
down, every galloping toe
and dark, sinuous limb:
the summer is lined
with silver, and it is now
I feel foreign to the sky.
Red
Rock Twisters (Garber,
Oklahoma)
South and west, the
fields bow
beneath the whip of
ribbons.
A brief family, I say,
perhaps like mine
and always in motion, five
hands
joined only tip to tip.
I see their needles
stitch the earth
and draw blood—russet
crescents in the corn, dark
whorls,
maybe the prints of speech:
these things are also ours.
They run against the
hands
of the clock, funnel vapors
the color
of garage doors, mailboxes.
Our chickens kill each
other in the barn;
their screams die with the
breeze.
Galen says a twister can
fuse
the coins in your pocket.
Grandfather has seen them
cook potatoes still hunched
in soil.
Between gray cracks I
watch them
fall apart and draw to sky,
their father last and
loudly;
I think he wishes it were
otherwise—
that the pain of contact be
not so great.
Seth Abramson is a 1998
graduate of Dartmouth College and a second-year student at Harvard
Law School. His work has been published or forthcoming in Savoy
Magazine, The Southern Ocean Review, Eclectica,
The Fish Eye Review, Renaissance Magazine, and The
Melic Review |