C-Train & 13 Mexicans (2002)

Twenty-nine

I lived in an old Victorian clapboard, trim-fringed
with flowery garlands, spiral staircase, milk-paned front-door glass.
A cemetery behind the house.
Checkered fields, rumpling in blue and yellow and buttoned with cracked shacks.
Grubbing country. Country of suicide
on full-moon nights.
On the porch my nephew aiming on the crosshairs
of his new BB gun
shot the right eye out of an owl in the tree in the front yard at night.
It dropped a lead arrow on the end of a plumb line,
full of death, gray wings dazed
grasped helplessly for air-
it careened in dirt at the foot of the tree.
I was horrified when my nephew called me out to ask my help!
"What should we do, Uncle Jimmy?"
Its right eye splintered into a ribbon of jellied blod
reflected in its moon slime red mirror
our meaningless violence.
I tasted this stupid act
chalk on my tongue
as if I had opened a coffin and stuffed my mouth with
bone dust.
I could hardly breathe. My young nephew, taught to shoot at
anything that moves,
listened as I told him the owl's eye is his soul
one of two, it carries, and taking the right eye
destruction would now follow.
We were scared
confused
as he held the owl
blood dropped on the bare board
porch
under the porch light;
at our shoes
warm feathers
exuded omen of evil to come.
Its claws were underground stalagmites
its beak a spiritual cutting knife.
Suddenly the darkness counted our graces
we held it as coins divided between thieves
and the coldness of the hour left us alone, bitterly numb
with the act.
"We must let him go."
There are things you don't doctor: no vet, no forgiveness for some acts.
The hillside beauty contoured in dark folds
gave up a minty fragrance of black spring ground worming awake.
"Let it go."
Bloodletting owl's eye.
is a world with no axis,
is a boat at sea with no man;
in the owl's bloody eye
I saw
smoking mirror
plumes of gray smoke
making my eyes cry.

It was not
till a few nights later
that my sister and her husband sat playing cards
in the parlor
while I sat upstairs typing away
and through the floorboard cracks
smoke unfurled.
I heard my name cried, then screams,
and when I ran downstairs
the house was gagged in smoke
and the smell of burning picture frames;
smoldering couch wood
crackled beneath my shoes.
Standing outside, watching the house burn,
I saw the owl's eye
throw its golden glare over the cemetery, over our face,
bronzing our guilt and the night a baroque plaque
etched with blossoming trees, white headstone, flagstone walkway
and four people standing arm in arm
at a distance from the flames
guilty of the deed.
Everything we had was destroyed.

Arc of cleansing fire
cackling through recent brush memory
towering heat
giving back the sigh of our frailty
and how little we really know.
I gripped my nephew's hand
looked down in his face
I knew his eyes saw the owl's eye
In the flame-
this house fire had given back the owl
an eye
he took.

We walked down the dirt road,
an emptiness of wrong filled us.
My sister, hysterical, fled into the alfalfa fields and danced
twirled and twirled by herself,
then she rushed to the cemetery
and sat, back toa headstone, and wept,
I followed her, patted her sobbing shoulders,
praising what we had lost
as an event to start over
giving the fire a prayer, a cleansing prayer.
Rubble of ash smoldering behind us
a feathery incantation
of a lost eye
no amount of technology could repair…
only something in the heart that tells us
all life is as valuable
as ours.