The Length of the Hour

By Cynthia Huntington b. 1951 Cynthia Huntington

New houses relax on the fields.

Garage doors open soundlessly

to admit the monster. Tires stretched

over forty pounds of air

pressure float across gravel.

The boy closes the last storm

door on the last evening

paper and runs to the car

where his mother waits. She does not

answer him; the door slam freezes

her dreams. It is January.

A dog chained to a barn door

keeps barking. Somebody’s angry,

scared to let him go.

On the other side

of a forest past these fields,

wolves sniff the hard snow

of the tundra. I lay beside the only

tree for warmth, there

where the pack might find me.

The house takes care of us now.

Look at the meat

browning under the light.

The refrigerator switches on;

ice crashes into the tray.

Here are locks in case someone

wants to do us harm. Remember

how the police had to pound and pound

to wake us that night a white Cadillac

leapt from the icy road

into the arms of our maple! It hung there,

empty, doors flung wide—

it was a great white petal of a car,

breathing under the gas-lights, opening

and opening.

Source: The Fish-Wife (University of Hawai'i Press, 1986)

Biography

Cynthia Huntington was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania. She earned a BA at Michigan State University and an MA from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College.

Huntington’s free verse poems often examine the bare mind, restlessly turning the form of the individual against both built and natural environments, mapping both threat and respite against a shifting screen of personal memory. Introducing her early work in . . .

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