Arrivals and Departures
.
She squeezed her belly out from behind the wheel.
The red and white Ford matched their mobile home.
“Que Sera,” sang her namesake on the radio.
“Let’s hope”, she muttered, swinging to the screen door.
She hears him swing the Le Sabre into the garage.
The motorized door closes behind him.
Is this the last time her oldest will rattle the house?
Jackson Brown’s “Dust in the Wind” tinny on the radio.
Their tiny trailer home is parked in a gravel court.
The Ford had barely managed to tow it from the farm.
Her last term teaching had not been easy. At the school picnic
she’d practically choked on the hardest kicks yet.
He sets the groceries down on the counter, then
off to his room—a call or a record—not seeing her
turn from the sink in hopes of a hug. Maybe
on the last camping trip…too many distractions here.
Their new TV had been a welcome distraction all that spring:
Elvis’s scandalous hips, the first “Edge of Night”, the news.
Eisenhower was the man of this house, she was reminded.
She works on her cooking hoping for fewer burnt pancakes.
At the lake, she cooks and paces. She feels him
pulling away even from her gaze. He has eyes
only a distant shore and tall towers, it seems.
He runs in cut-offs after his old pal, the dog.
The old wives were right. Castor oil
launched the clenching and ripping.
She came to with his wet head on her breast,
his father beside them in a checked sport shirt.
His bags checked, they await the prop plane.
What’s left to say after 22 years? Was anything ever—?
A hug, a quick kiss, he lopes up the steps, hatch closes, gone.
On the quiet ride home, she hums “Que Sera.”
.
Night Writer
.
August. I am sleepless and stuck in Rome,
working a job from someone else’s dream.
Tossing off clinging sheets I go to the window
and widen the shutters for more air.
Faint stars sprinkle the golden dome of Roman night,
its fetid haze of hiatus.
Their lights are almost audible in the vacated silence
of cats hunting the ruins, of the red-lamped naves.
The sweet mountain zephyr—
and only on this sea does “zephyr” pertain—
descends from the hills,
flushes the day’s dry heat out to sea and
soothes my beaded brow.
A rat-a-tat-tat catches my drowsy ear:
a drumbeat, then a cymbal—someone is typing.
From my aerie the stories of windows
wrap around the courtyard in a 1930’s grid.
Geometry was progress then.
One or two lit windows sentinel the shadows.
The erratic rhythm almost echoes, traceless.
It is a sound soon to be silenced for all time,
that tap-tap-tap-ching of the 20th century lyre.
It calls to my storyteller, my bard, my troubadour.
I listen and yearn to take a seat,
to crank a slice of paper and carve with those keys
a lament, a tirade, an epic launched
by a golden apple, a lullaby…
or how it feels to gaze out on an August night and hear
someone’s mind at play, inviting me along
to leap from this life and incise a new story.
.
BIO: Bruce E Whitacre’s poems have appeared in American Journal of Poetry, Buddhist Poetry Review, Cagibi, Hey, I’m Alive, Impossible Archive, Nine Cloud Journal, North of Oxford, Pensive Journal, Poets Wear Prada Rainbow Project (nominated for Best of the Net), and World Literature Today. His work is included in The Strategic Poet by Diane Lockward, Brownstone Poets 2020, and in the anthology, I Want to be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is a native of Nebraska and lives in Forest Hills, Queens with his husband. More at www.brucewhitacre.com.
