POEM
It Didn’t Begin with Horned Owls
It Didn’t Begin with Horned Owls
Hooting at Noon
Though in them he heard the weird symmetry
of loss and love’s becoming, a great silence
between one call and the other’s reply.
So he laid block, framed studs into walls:
plumb, square, on line. He stayed up late,
straightening bent nails on the lip of a block
with his ballpeen hammer, the way a contractor
with a sprung back had shown him. Evenings
he went next door to talk, toting his thermos
of bitter coffee and a picture of his son
who’s dying of AIDS. Son he’d failed, son
he’d pounded on and never got right. When he
was ready to hang sheet rock, he penciled on
women with bulbous breasts and legs
he’d spread wide, women bent at the waist
as if in supplication to some irremediable need
only his hand could quiet. Then he hung
the rock with his women facing him, sometimes
sawing them in two. On the morning he finished
he rolled paint over each and all of them.
Every wall white in the room where his son,
forgiving him, was coming home to wait.
Reprinted from A Circus of Want by Kevin Stein by permission of the University of Missouri Press. Copyright © 1992 by the Curators of the University of Missouri.
Source: A Circus of Want (University of Missouri Press, 1992)
Kevin Stein is a poet who is primarily concerned with the nature of significance and . . . MORE »
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