|
Laurie Byro
Salt
My mother would play Hank Williams sometimes
and beg the men at the bar to dance the Two Step
or some old-fashioned reel I barely knew.
I was six. I would think of my father coming
home with his empty thermos and us not there again.
I had a stomach full of fear, glasses shattering
as his hand would clear the table from the night
before. I’d plead with the bartender through eyes
like globed fruit. My mother would say
I was shy and they’d poke bony fingers at me.
If one pulled me on his lap while my mother
danced, I’d smell the stale sweat and beer. I thought
of my father hanging damp laundry on the line, stirring
up a black cast iron skillet of potatoes. On the slick
wood there was a small bowl of salt. I’d play with it,
write Daddy, or a draw a heart and our initials. I promised
when I was older I’d steal away with him to Mexico.
February in Mustique
“Literature should act as an axe for the frozen sea inside us. ...
-- Franz Kafka
I spotted him, just off the reefs; I thought
he was a dolphin, heading in the wrong direction—
towards Mustique where I’d spent nine days
of tranquility, studying frangipani and conch,
coconut milk and sun brewed tea.
I’d left winter. My eyes were snow moons.
Back home, in waffles and wool I trudged
every day to the library where I’d meet Kafka in the stacks.
A shy, uptight patron, he cleared his throat
when he asked for the key to the men’s room.
Down here, I remembered my Czech friend
and wondered if he could possibly know this man
who’d booked his ticket, packed his suitcase
and somehow gotten through security with an axe.
Apparently, he was one of Kafka’s poems.
I came across Caliban again, in a tropical
forest as he chopped his way through native trees,
Flamboyant and Monkey Bamboo. I made him
follow me back to the hotel where I offered to buy
sun brewed tea, anything he fancied. Never mind
how I got him through the lobby, this rough and crafty
looking fellow. It is enough to know that after we wrestled
on my bed, a painting of a Gauguin woman looked
wide-eyed at the mess we’d made, and at me out
on the patio sipping daiquiri wrung out of my hair.
© Laurie Byro
|
