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The Black Dove


ISSUE:  Summer 1980
1

That summer it was the castoff
hundred pounds of Idaho reds
sizzled in Crisco, salt
a mainline luxury, it was
a repetitious dry tickle in the throat
numb to water, our
armpits smelling of rotten
apples, your
belly swelling
with the child I’d planted in you,
however “impossibly.”

2

Simmering mornings I lined up
at the sawmill for “the unemployed.”
As the wiry foreman, Sol,
picked us over like livestock.
I cringed against the chalky wall
like a suspect—it had to be
some kind of privilege
to inhabit the inside of a hive
while planks collapsed and split
and saws broke their teeth on steel.
At least I was blessed by the salt
that crusted over my skin—
it kept the smell of my own
contracted sweat
away from my nose.

3

Numbed by then
to easy omens, spring’s
most cherished inheritance,
a pet duckling no
fledgling anymore
waddled splashing
into a drainpipe at
yard’s end never
to emerge. Sprawled
in muddy water, desperate
as a father to find him,
I aimed my head
through the opening
to no end,
thrust my arm in
up to the shoulder,
to the limit of my tendon’s pull
to touch
nothing, to see
nothing, a
trickle of black ditchwater
oozed up my flashlight’s
scalloped rim, that
and a pungent rot
gathered over how many years
I tried not to breathe.

4

Later that summer
I missed the last train
and could not pull myself away
from the shattered
glass of a phone booth,
trying to fix the broken fan,
telephone dangling
from a rusted iron cord,
the one sound left in the world
to free me was the one I heard—
busy, busy, busy!

5

It was this dream released me:
a thickset bald headhunter,
dull yellow snakes
tattooed on his forearms,
paddled a canoe up a slow
waterfall with the wrong
end of the oar, getting
nowhere in pursuit of me,
and as I plunged into the next
maelstrom to be spewn
into the next he never moved
while the current rippled
around him in silence,
and a black dove hovered
overhead like a hawk, treading
air, shedding
feather after feather,
and each one
took instantly to flight.

6

Now
in the tepid, portentous
summer of ‘76,
after witnessing
a Puerto Rican kid
wave a tiny plastic American flag
from the roof of a ‘58 Chevrolet
in full warpaint, in full
view of the Hudson as the tall ships pass
and their masts
drag the clouds upriver,
I come home
and rummage through old luggage,
to unearth a glossy blow-up
of you, hugging
the edge of the cliff
that jutted over the glass city
like a gangplank,
and for the splinter of a moment—
rubbing my thumb over the dull, hard
edge of the photograph—I think
that the Amoco sign, deeply
submerged in the background, shaped
like a heart is still
 blinking.

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