Rolly Kent

The Hammock

My mother taught us anatomy but was
silent about the soul. The soul, she said,
will not be studied; goodness is best left
hidden like the nest of the orioles
that swayed in our branches. Although we
didn’t have trees close together to tie to,
goodness must have been what she was after:
We bought a white, Navy surplus hammock
you could hitch to a metal frame instead of
a tree. But my father couldn’t figure out
the assembly; he surrendered the job
to my mother. For days, flecked with raindrops
and footprints of birds, our hammock lay
on the ground like an unread letter from
the sky. One sunset after dinner I
sat down on the canvas and since the hammock
could not swing, I swung myself side to side;
the colored clouds and all that blue moved
like a lady’s paper fan, faster and
faster. I got dizzy watching how
easily the soul of each thing yields to
the soul of another. My mother laughed,
we picked up the hammock, brushed off
the dead grass, and carried it to the porch.
From chains hooked to the rafters she hung it;
she’d already painted the porch ceiling blue.
And there my mother slept suspended on
a pale comma as the summer night darkened.
Strange that in the morning as I write this
I cannot find her; all that’s there where
she was is some paper, like the bleached sky
at the end of the mind. Better hurry now,
memory says, better get ready, for
soon I must go and beyond me there
are no trees in which to study the light.

• • •

Owl

His territory is himself, his voles
and lizards, his ridgepoles, his eucalyptus.
For years, the same owl, the same hushed huh-hu-
hu-huu. But tonight, though he sits in the tree
outside the house, he seems to be calling
from a long ways off, just as my age now
once was too far ahead to even call it
the future. No owl could be that old; yet
even owl song can reach the outer
stanza of what a self is, inquiring
of the night huh-hu-who else? And when
nobody answers in the language of
owls he goes on sounding out– how far to
the end of the street, the hill, the next
street, the next hill, the sky, the end of
the sky and the end of himself; and if
no answer comes, he negotiates how
much silence should be his. Then it is
so quiet I hear only distance.

• • •

Wet Cement
APRIL 30, 1975

My father was, as the Scottish say, a man
with no hands. He could not fix what was broken.
But he made up for it in sheer connivery–
Nixon fallen was still Dad’s Wingèd Victory–
At the front of the yard part of a wall
had crumbled; he’d got as far as carting off
the rubble. When I came home that April he
started to crow his husbandry: the puny
clutch of grass where he’d poured a pound of seed,
the terrible surgery in tree after tree,
the blasted roses along the drive, Dormant,
not dead, he noted cheerfully; for the tour,
he liked to say, was his ‘Owed to the Avenue.’
Ode my foot. More wreck than reparation.
Ruin, that was his poetry, his sleight
of hand of things so far gone they were at
the end of being anything, all slash
and silver tape. The wall– that was his next
con– Yes, got lots to do once you’re gone.
Yet trickery was how we got along.
So on a fine day, beneath the maimed but
budding maples, first I braced up forms four feet
high by twelve long with cast-off pipes, and with
the wood splinted into place, shoveled
endless rounds of six parts sand, three parts portland
and nine or ten gravel, and when that was mixed
slowly raveled in the water, then pulled it
with the taped-up garden hoe, raveled and hoed,
raveled and hoed, and by bucketfuls poured
into the long, deep breach; and every
so often I’d peer into the work to see
how high the new wall reached, and if I was
pleased, I’d cease shoveling and hoeing and
bailing. Like that I was resting, leaning
on a handle, the ache sinking away
from my arms, when I noticed I had stopped
thinking; I wiped my neck, then my brow–
something fell past my face, as if it had
tumbled from my mind, into the wooden
casts. I knelt to see what. Nothing, it seemed,
when through the gray mucus a tiny wing
poked, weakly stirring cement; the other
wing was broken, folded like a refusal
across the body while the good wing kept
willing flight. I reached to extract him–
my father was walking down the steps with
iced tea in his hand. I pointed to the bird;
he looked in, then up through the scotched limbs.
Then he handed me the tea. I was glad
that my father did not speak for robins.
War’s over, was what he said. Thirtieth of
April, 1975. By the hundred thousands
the South Vietnamese, dressing up for their
vanquishment, rushed the streets to shout and sing,
while above Saigon someone from the wrong
wing of loyalty clung to the chopper
landing skid, above him faces and hands,
below him the giddy swirl of victory,
the river plunging like a silver neckline
towards the sea. The sky is the language birds
fly in, but it was not my father’s, or mine.
I pushed that robin down deeper with a stick,
as if there he could find another sky
where history is not eternity’s trick.

• • •