SOOT

 

 

Brown bricks and yellow leaves,

ash colored soot in the eaves,

on-coming sleet and snow and a question

stuck in my craw like a dog’s tongue

stuck to a frozen pump.

 

What I know begins with friends and kin

who knew my name,

who filled my glass with corn whisky.

 

Redwing, persimmon and kudzu,

black eye and chicken blood, pig balls,

catfish, craps and gut-bucket

blues shaped from lives

whose story could break your heart.

 

What in hell am I doing in this

northern state, so far from

everything I know and call home?

 

It isn’t a question with an answer

that calls a man from what he knows

with the promise of a word

more than bitter and burning his tongue.

He wakes to see, slowly, his claim

 

to the true north of his fathers

 

who woke perhaps as I woke,

empty-handed, cold, among strangers

asking my name, offering bread

and wine, lamb or fish, leeks,

coffee and cognac.

 

So why should I miss those others?

Why do I wish them here?

Ron Price

 

 

Tracking the Return

 

 

Harry got into it last year with a neighbor.

He came out the front door shouting,

I told you, keep that dog off my grass.

If you can’t, he said, I will.

 

He got in his car and floored it backward

across the yard. Harry meant to run down the dog

and struck the guy, broke his leg.

 

When we were seventeen, everyone I knew was lost.

Flying off to war, coming home in body bags.

Disappearing into drugs, into their children.

One couple started talking to God

and the silence they heard convinced them.

 

Coming through it could make a man ready to sing,

or hate. I came back, Harry said,

I didn’t come through. I should have died then.

 

Bernstein and his son were in Harry’s house.

Harry was bringing dinner from his restaurant.

Bernstein heard hollering,

then Harry walked in, went to the kitchen,

came back and walked out the door.

 

A minute later he walked in and said,

Get ready. Then into the bedroom, and back,

his hands full of cash,

stuffing the bills in a brown paper bag.

 

Harry knew exactly what he was doing.

I put a knife in his chest, he said, and left it there.

I believe this will cover my bail.

 

 

Ron Price

 

 

AFTER THE ABORTION

 

What’s left between them – fruit

rotting on the ground –

a shadow – what lies tangled

between roots of the mulberry bush –

a ghost without bones – nothing –

 

 

Ron Price

 

 

The Way Rain Finds Water

 

On the surface of a puddle

squirrels flee a vegetable garden,

carrying tomatoes along a telephone line.

They disappear in the dark among trees,

almost as invisible to the man

running out the back door

as the raccoon in the weeds

 

watching the puddle,

squirrels on the surface of the puddle,

and a man running out the back door.

The raccoon squats low in the weeds.

The man throws a beer can at the last squirrel,

misses the squirrel, the telephone line.

 

Home is a garden to flee

with all the bounty you can steal.

 

The man turns to gathering

every tomato the squirrels left on the vines.

The raccoon squats lower in the weeds

and watches one man destroy

every vestige of his garden.

 

Drizzle begins to dimple the puddle’s surface.

 

The man takes the tomatoes into his house,

spends the day canning. That’s it,

he says, No more goddamn gardens.

 

Ron Price

 

THE BODY REMEMBERING

 

 

I have no memory of my life,

she says, before 17 or 18. I ask

how it feels to forget your childhood.

 

We were celebrating her 40^th birthday.

She’s married, and his business

keeps him weeks at a time away from home.

 

Children fill her days, a summer garden,

pottery through fall and winter,

although spring leaves her bedridden for weeks –

 

which is where she first remembered

she forgot. I ask, and she says,

I don’t think about it.

 

 

Ron Price

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BENEATH THE WINGBEAT OF PIGEONS

 

 

Dawn crawls up out of the river

darkening the edges of buildings as a few birds

rise black over the scummed water

and a man out for a walk stops

to call his unleashed dog from the alley.

 

I watched a dawn like this as a boy.

There was a man, his twelve-gauge, and his dog.

He dragged the woman out of a flophouse,

aimed at her, turned and fired

at the screen door.

 

In less than an hour

heat will begin to blister the street

until the screeches of traffic

flare up twenty, thirty, forty floors into the deaf air,

melting any audible human or animal sound.

 

Dawn is the gift of memory.

 

Three birds in silhouette dive through the lit sky

turning from orange to white through shades of blue.

Ron Price