We watched strangers in a graveyard of historical significance pose their daughter by a tombstone taller than she was and snap a dozen pictures. And why not. She glowed in the gust of its ambient menace. Maybe they spend entire vacations doing this, recording the way she deflects grim proximities— rocks that leer, coy precipices, waterfalls breathing on her. Things that should swallow her up but don’t. Maybe a father’s job is to build, or try to build, some rapport with all such predators. Maybe that’s why, in a massive hanger on D.C.’s outer rim, my nephew’s father stood his son beneath the Enola Gay, its taut silver belly throwing that pretty light on him. And took this. Look at the sweet kid, beaming there. Look at the plane smiling back.
Like all the overly confident you seemed
insufficiently lonely
and ashamed, sitting there looking made
to sit there, missing no body
in particular. I’m the hat, you preened, the ground
was meant to wear, the earth
was forged to hold me up. But you are cheap,
we said, and fake, lightweight,
extravagant—and we feel about you the way we feel
about all false extravagant
people and books and magazines and Christmas trees
and car commercials and friends
and family and strangers: Disapproval, and Disapproval’s
bonus tracks, Panic
and Wonder—at the fact that you keep trying to sell us
an ounce of something pretty,
something potent—keep nudging us, There are joys
I might speak of
if only you darlings would listen. As though
we haven’t been,
and hard, ever since our heads could turn,
and hands cry,
and eyes beat,
and hearts clasp.
A thunderstorm tricks the streetlamps into blinking on
so I wonder if you’re pregnant.
I have no evidence other than the streetlamps blinking on
and the headaches I get every day
and for those to count there would have to be some tenuous
diaphanous thread subtly linking
us over distance. The day before you left for Canada you saw,
on the research triangle’s lonely
cone-strewn path, a dead goose, and wondered what it meant,
so I told you—Don’t Go to Canada.
But you did, and lo and behold came back, in one piece, so
I guess there’s no diaphanous thread,
no cruel etherous ribbon of logic linking you and me
and the goose, one twinge, one pain
to another, making us signs of each other. The goose died,
my head hurts, the rain breaks,
the streetlamps blink off, the phone doesn’t ring, a great V creaks
and wobbles across the bedspread sky,
the phone doesn’t ring, the rain starts again, my head stops
breaking, and nothing, I’m almost
positive that nothing, begins to divide itself in you.
When did we last see the stars
throw down their old photons like spears—
got us a kid, a furnace of joy,
and never the same contraption twice
will hoist her to the attic of sleep.
So when did we last see the stars—
what are stars—every night new
beasts need reining and new knots inventing
to lash them to barges as yet
unbuilt, to import some tenuous
volatile dream in glass still
boulders, in plastic still dinosaurs on
canals undug on water
unwrung from pending clouds. But let us
emphasize the miracles: We are tongs
arranging the flames in a furnace
of joy. Anvils don’t weep
when a hot tongue of new metal
licks and glories
in the sparks all night. A grindstone stands
its ground when a raw new blade
angles into it, hungry for the edge
it gives. Who needs stars—we are
tongs, we are anvils, we are stones,
singed by duty, darkened by
our specialties, living in a darkness filled
with molten light. If we could go outside
on a winter night like this, like men
punching out at the foundry,
our eyes would take forever to adjust
and see what we think we have missed,
and what would we say except what we already say? When
did we last see the stars, What are stars,
but a country of leftover fire,
overthrown long before we were born?
Christopher Todd Matthews’ work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Crazyhorse, FIELD, The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, Massachusetts Review, and Shenandoah among other places. He lives with his partner and their daughter in Ann Arbor, Michigan.