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While You Were Asleep, Traveling Toward the Dark, and Roadkill Song
by Jerry McGinley While You Were Asleep Your cat Clancy caught a mouse and drowned it in his water dish. A snowplow cleared our alley but sheared off the neighbor’s mailbox. The TV flashed Breaking News—a gay man plans to play pro football. An ash tree fell in the woods beside the house, and no one heard it. Russia invaded Crimea, and I located Crimea in the atlas. Blaring rescue sirens raced out to a rollover on the Interstate. I finished that book by the writer who just won the Nobel Prize. Three young raccoons set off the security light in our back yard. I am sure I heard bassoon music, but it must’ve been the wind. A voice in the vacant room upstairs kept whispering, “Salir! Salir!” Cumulus clouds swooshed like witches in front of the full moon. I swear I saw the shadow of a man hanging in our neighbor’s tree. Darkness changes reality. Darkness swallows lone men’s sanity. The world is different at three in the morning. So few people know. Traveling Toward the Dark (Apologies to William Stafford) First day of March—on a morning flight from Arizona, I listen to the relentless drone of engines and breathe stagnant pressurized air. Behind me two people cackle endlessly about flipping real estate in Boston. I do not care. My neck hurts and I squirm from side to side to find relief. Most passengers snooze, or try to, play video solitaire, or stare at watches. I doze briefly and dream I’m riding on the back of a flying white deer, fists gripping dense fur, racing through pine trees swathed with blood. My wife, whose neck aches too, has read ninety pages of Little Bee while I skim two poems in Smoke’s Way. I think about pioneers on westbound wagon trains who understood every river current, every blade of Big Bluestem grass, every spike of purple-pink Prairie Blazingstar, every waterhole where Bison wallowed, every bracken bush, every valley hiding Apaches or deer. Pioneers, who ate real food at night—venison, beans, corn mush, wild berries—no pretzels or warm ginger ale. Outside my small window, thirty-five thousand feet below, just dull brown rocks and bare earth, randomly intersected by empty roads, occasionally dotted by two-horse towns. We travel at incredible speed, now—but totally miss the journey. Roadkill Song We were brothers once half a million years ago. We gathered hickory nuts, wild berries, chicory roots. We slept in damp mossy caves, heated by our own flesh and fur. Fire was still too strange, saved for suns and stars. But I messed up my Karma, and evolved backward through simpler forms. You moved on, stood upright. Tonight your headlights caught my feral yellow eyes. I froze in the icy brightness of your unnatural glare. Tomorrow crows will come to ingest and transport my chi to another place, someday perhaps, our paths will cross again. |
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