Issue
1:2 | Poetry |
Michael
McFee
I found
their snapshot buried at the bottom
of my
parents' jumbled bedside table drawer:
a normal
couple, somewhere out of doors,
smiling
big for the camera, holding hands,
each of
them wearing black socks, blacker shoes,
and nothing
else: naked, totally naked,
and totally
unaroused or unashamed,
just standing
there like it was no big deal.
And then
my mother walked in. I was caught
not with
one of the girlie magazines
(a teasing
peak at breasts, some skin, no more)
borrowed
from older boys across the street
but with
this photo she and dad had hidden,
this dangling
Adam, this pale and drooping Eve.
Their
pubic hair was deeper than outer space.
"Who are
these people?" My voice nearly broke.
"Oh, those
are just the nudists, dear," she said,
then took
the picture and waited till I left
and firmly
closed the bedroom door behind me.
I never
found that friendly pair again,
though
later I learned there were some naturists
who ran
a colony in the next county,
way out
in the hills, a place called Eden View.
Did my
parents ever go, or think about it,
before
two children ruined both their bodies?
And did
they meet the nudists in the snapshot,
emigrants
from the Empire of the Clothed
to a place
where only sun and wind dressed them?
Or did
they just like to look at him and her
before
or after love, or now and then,
a smaller
younger happier version
of what
they were, of what they might have been?
OLD
PILLOW
Uncased,
it's a bulging ceiling
stained
by seepage from a leaky roof.
How could
her sleeping head have sweated so,
its yellow
dreams sinking
through
pillowcases for years, whatever the season,
soaking
this ticking?
It's a
swollen sheet of paper
troubled
by a nightmare wash of clouds.
What smoky
signals was her brain sending
to the
pillow's foam brain
as she
lay beside him through the cool still nights,
quietly
oozing away?
It's a
spirit-headstone, faintly marbled.
It's the
veronica that some god leaves through us.
ROADSIDE
TABLE
It was
an ugly slab of rough concrete
or warped
green boards carved and stained
by greasy
sticky previous picnickers
but still
we'd pack the creaking station wagon
with hungry
relatives and cardboard boxes
full of
deviled-egg luster under wax paper
and fried
chicken's golden warm aroma
and the
moist strata of granny's coconut cake
then drive
for what felt like forever, starving,
till dad
saw a blue sign for one just ahead
and pulled
off into a shady dirt turnout
between
the busy highway and some river
where
we all waited while meticulous aunts
brushed
off the crumby weathered surfaces
then unfolded
a tablecloth of newspapers
which
we held down with the now-cooled feast
before
suffering through interminable grace
and loading
our flimsy plates with layers
of food
as if we never ate at home,
as if
we didn't have our own picnic table
around
which, anytime, we all could gather.
Tourists
driving by us might have laughed
at this
simple mountain clan that had to eat
at a borrowed
wayside table, too dirt-poor
to afford
an inside dining room of their own,
just as
shoulder-walkers were to be pitied
for not
having enough money to own a car,
but they'd
have been wrong: it was pure holiday
to linger
in that place, in public privacy
between
the currents of road and water,
cooled
by the luxurious breezes of both
as cousins
skipped flat rocks to the far bank
or waded
on shivering legs into the river
and cigarette
smoke rose toward the understory
and the
ripening barrels hummed electric with bees
and watermelon
seeds shone blackly under the laurels.
Michael
McFee