Between Earth and Sky

1. Mother

In “American Portrait Old Style,”
when Robert Penn Warren speaks

of “a Plymouth Rock or maybe a fat Dominecker
that fell to the crack of the unerring Decherd,”

I ache for his experience to be mine,
young imagination killing real hens,

but I never killed a blessed thing
with my lever-action air carbine.

I pinged at robins, jays and grackles
who flew away cackling,

single copper beads dripping from their armor feathers
while I punctured nothing, but drew the mild wrath

of a burly State trooper nicknamed Chink
who peered through the screen at our verandah door.

Frightened by his length and broad flat hat
pinch-rumpled to a stiff point,

what could I do but cringe apology
and be relieved he didn’t confiscate my gun,

the only little gift my father gave
that didn’t disappear or break.

My lonely mother, who liked the tall cop’s kindly face,
saw “punishment enough” in my dark gaze.


2. Father

When my sobered father took his belt
to me it was not for dinging glass or birds

but for a time I couldn’t stop
myself and on a wet spring day popped

a single hole in the shiny rubber boot
of a younger kid I thought of as a boob,

a cruelty of mine that now confuses me
because I hate to think how—thoughtless, wierdly free—

I must have held the cocked toy rifle pressed against
his yellow toe cap belly and squeezed the trigger,

and after the pumped-air’s muffled cough
I lifted the muzzle from a little BB hole

as if a copper worm had burrowed in his toe.
Though everything inside the boot was whole,

his shiny new protection leaked. No Chink came,
and my feckless dad had only me to blame

for whatever shame he must have felt
when the wronged boy’s mother yelled.

But still, some days I woke with joy
and dreamed awake this weapon toy

quick-charged with air I drew myself
was really capable of murder.