Nancy Meneely

Think Now

Think now of the man no more
than boy wholly armed,
no more hero in the cause
than a gladiator martyred
to the pleasure of the Circus,
player in a drama needing
witless sacrifice.

Think now of the child no more
than metaphor,
no more human
than the cardboard
silhouette the man has targeted
in training meant to empty him
of all but brute and on the mark.

Think now of the warrior no more
than father who catches by mistake
the look of a child so utterly untutored
in the possibility of hate
his eyes fill only with surprise.
Think how the warrior falters
in his aim.

Think now of the son no more
than foundling as his people
fall around him,
bullets only heat across his hair.
Think now of him alive amid
the after wreckage of the all before,
every sense unequal to the task
of telling him that this is how
continuing must be.

Think now of both of them no more
than prisoners of moments
ten years gone reclaiming them
each night in dreams they wake from
mewling and divided
and wondering whose life is theirs
to take today.

Together Alone

My sisters and I were lucky
in the where of our lives
on Dad’s hilltop farm
though it bound us
in the solitude of siblings
miles away from friends.
It wasn't beautiful, most of it
shale disguised by thin layers of soil.
A ragged swath of lawn
slipped steep toward the river
on the east, ended sharp on the west
at the quarry’s edge.

We loved the wild it bordered
and the other foreign country
of the barn. We dared ourselves
to venture near the brush
the quarrymen had left behind,
the piles a family of long black snakes
made home.

We pretended everywhere.

We loved the movement of the year,
the seasons close to us
and generous in ways
our town friends wouldn't know.
The big fall sky rose clean and limitless
above the mountains massed
with muted fire below.
Winter storms enclosed the barn,
smoothed the bitten fields
where summer sheep had grazed,
tamed the sawtoothed quarry floors,
filling them with snow and blowing
head-high drifts against their walls.
Spring awoke the sweetness of the creek,
clumsy and hilarious with melt,
flowing like liquid glass
across our naked hands.
Summer’s wind was freighted
with the golden smell
of drying pasture grass
where we would search for spittle bugs.
Wonderful terrible storms
came black from behind the barn.

Left each to herself in such bounty
of loneliness, we found
our own ways to manage
the weather inside the house.
Dodi found places to hide.
Sally took song from everywhere,
wove birdsound and leaf talk
and thin winter wind into music
that chased itself
up the keyboard and back
to cover the sad beneath.
I found a place to sit
between roots of the nearer trees
and traveled the words
of my father’s books
to mountains and seas,
places of fierce alone
that pulled me backward
into what I didn’t know
and blindered me to what I did.
Odd, the peace to be found
in words that carry you
all by yourself and perfectly lost
in the lesser frights to be felt
in utterly other worlds.

And now I know the peace
that comes of wrangling words
that fight my uses gently back
till together we settle the land,
the seasons, the ways we grew
from the outside in, together alone.

My Mother Called the Game

He died the first time
as he swung my mother
in the polka that she loved.
A half-jump traced and burst
a weakened channel in his brain
and Henry’s heart was left alone
inside the system of himself.
In hospital, they joined him
to the pleated tube insisting
that he breathe in rhythm suited
to the cadence of a mantle clock.
For days we’d watched him pulsing so.
Unwillingly, my mother said.
She called the game
and Henry died again. He shrank
to no one instantly, the ersatz
rise and fall of his chest
arrested as the cord was pulled.

I knew the meaning of the ease
with which he went:
It wasn’t really he who’d been
the occupant of what we kissed goodbye.
At other beds where I’ve sat vigilant,
death has given notice of itself
as dying keeps a promise
to a tired heart that it may slow
and stop. Enshrouded in a silence
long bereft of who he was,
Henry simply ceased,
a person something like alive then not.

If my mother wept, it was alone.
She walked away from him
dry-eyed. I watched her spin
the final spiral of her shell.