Some Say . . . Ice

   His grandmother had told him the story of Icarus, so he became a child of the night sky. He liked to lay on the grass of the yard and imagine traveling to the farthest star. Not this one, nor the next, but the one after the one after that and so on. Try as he might, however, he never got much past the next one before his eyes clouded over and his effort became lost in the cold darkness above him.

   One night, resolving to get farther, he found himself seeing beyond everything he had seen before. Although his mind was spinning crazily and his eyes were turning around in his head, he pushed on until he found himself looking back at the known universe while he sped across what learned men refer to as the "event horizon" beyond which, those same learned men say, there is nothing and no return.

   When his grandmother, still in her apron, dish towel and plate in hand, came out to call him to bed, all that remained was a frosty deposit forming an outline where he had lain. There was a drafty chill throughout the yard. "Land sakes!" she exclaimed, shivering, "What is that boy up to now?"

glwarren, 2014 

   

  

Alone At Last

   Enola has skin like fine old leather, smooth, but brittle and worn scarily thin. I am careful when I touch her not to tear or bruise. Her breasts are like the flaps of pockets; her lips hard, thin lines that I am afraid may slit my own papery flesh if too passionately applied. We have met like this before, the first time being when Caroline died. We came together quite accidentally and in a conjugal way after the funeral and then agreed to do the same after the funeral of every friend until they were all gone. We reasoned that it would help to ease our sorrow.

   But wait, I ask, what will become of the other when, finally, as is certain to happen, one of us passes? Enola laughs uncontrollably, her side cramping, her ribs colliding and then, laughing still, cradles my face with her long sinewy fingers. "Don't be such a ninny, Jack!" she scolds, moving closer, her nose nearly touching mine. "Haven't we each had more than enough practice at going it alone?"

glwarren, 2014 

Poor Folk

   Ira Sams was born with nearly useless legs on which he got about with the help of crutches fashioned from branches of a bodark tree. The knobby limbs were wrapped at the bottom with pieces of tire inner tube so they would not poke holes in the linoleum floor. "Poor folk have poor ways," he was fond of saying in a faux apologetic manner. When he became sick with diabetes they had to remove one of his legs just above the knee. As if that were not enough misfortune for one man, in the same week that they had to remove his other leg his wife Margaret died from the epizeutic, leaving Ira to fend for himself. With the small amount of insurance from her death, Ira had the doctors make him two legs of plastic that were disproportionately lengthened, at his request, to make him nearly a foot taller! He seemed not to care that his torso appeared grotesquely stunted. "I have been a cripple all my life," he said. "Now I am a big man."

   With the remainder of Margaret's money he bought fancy suits and shoes to "keep up appearances," and wenched and boozed and gambled the rest away. While the money lasted, few objected that he was often offensively smug about his changed lot in life. When he marched about town on those long stiff legs of his, half a head taller than most, the children would look up and shout in mock terror "Look alive! Here comes Ira Sams!" to which he always responded with a big smile and a sweeping wave of his felt fedora hat. He was a "big man" for almost a year when, nearly penniless, he died from a blood clot on the brain. The cemetery association donated the plot next to Margaret's. The townspeople threw together a coffin of scrap plyboard barely four feet long and buried him with his plastic legs laid neatly by his side. Today there is a brief, complimentary, graveside service:

   "Poor folk have poor ways," saith the preacher. . . . "Amen." 

glwarren, 2014     

Zhivagoland

Winter is icummen in,

Lhude sing goddamm.

                                                                                   --Ezra Pound, from Ancient Music                                                                            

   A raw north wind rages about the plain. This old house, windows painted shut last summer, chinks sealed with can tin, old bed covers laid against the threshold and across the door, is no match for it. It is too cold to write, but it would be a good day to drive somewhere and let the sun warm the soul through the windshield. And if he were on the way to somewhere, I would visit friend Ray. But he has gone to North Dakota, land of sun dogs and Sacagawea, where winters hang on for millennia I am told, and where today, I am certain, it is too cold to write.

  Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago, doctor, in the dead of a Russian winter, by the light and warmth of a single candle, wrote love poems to Lara. Yet we wonder whether under our present circumstances we will ever write again. Let's not kid ourselves. We are no Doctors Zhivago. We are old men and over time the intense cold of this land has taken its toll on our words, frozen them rock solid in our brains, and no amount of alcohol or a good woman's loving can thaw them into usefulness again. We know. We have tried. We have no answer for it . . . only a few old Mandan prayers that will never be of use to us.

-glwarren, 2014

Notes

   Yes, I know, Pasternak and Pound make strange bedfellows. But the epigraph has a history in that even on the so-called southern plains the winter can be brutal. And when we were university students we dreaded its coming so much that at the first sign we began chanting that old Pound verse as if doing so might ward off the worst of it. We were the thinnest of boys with thinner coats and spent a lot of time drinking hot coffee with lots of creamer in the mothering warmth of the student union. Runny noses, watery eyes. Still . . . I believe the beginnings of some of our best literary efforts came from those winters. But that was a long, long time ago.    

Mother Passes

   Maybelle and Elberta, "My little peaches," our father used to call them, were already there. Sister Rosetta took my hand as I entered the room. "We are glad you are here," she said softly. I was "late as usual" by my sisters' accounting, having been notified several hours earlier that Mother hadn't long to live. "It is hopeless," complained Elberta. "Not a peep out of her since I arrived," she sniffled. Maybelle, meanwhile, kept shifting from one foot to the other as if her hemorrhoids were bothering her terribly. "I drove for hours for this?" she whined and shifted again. "I have told her she can let go," said Elberta with perfect aplomb. Then, suddenly and quite dramatically, as was her nature, Mother expired with a great whoosh of breath that Elberta would later characterize as having the odor of bad wine. To the great dismay of my sisters, Mother's head dropped to the side and her left eye, having failed to close, was staring directly at me. The girls became agitated and kept looking back and forth from me to the eye as if I were somehow to blame. "Well, say something! Do something!" demanded Elberta. I could not. I was transfixed by the stare. Sister Rosetta arrived to swiftly, gently, close the offending orb.

   "That was always her good eye," I felt obliged to say.

glwarren, 2014