Anna Journey: Armchair at the Beginning of the Myth
Half hinge, half prehistoric
cornered raptor: the sound as the armchair’s lever
swings and your father rises
from mulberry velveteen. Its raptor-cry
sluices through the den, has done so for as long
as your father’s watched nature documentaries.
Laid-off biologist. His boxed wine
and socked feet. His Peace Corp pocketknife
snug as a fossil. You watch the T.V. screen’s
ginger daubs of gazelle
wobble into meat, under a leopard’s jaw. The leopard’s
melanistic, my father says, like us, Red,
and our freckles. No one else
in the family can stomach the end
of the hunt. But you watch to possess
the landscape, razed with sun, the one
wildcat whose slick coat’s
a hypnotic piecemeal. A hot pulse. Like us,
you think, father—as we step into the sun,
in our exposed skin, become another.
Thief
Everyone has one: a mother’s childhood
house, stuck in the summer
rain of some other year. The year
the basement flooded and wiped
great-aunt Hilda’s watercolors back
to an elemental pulp. She painted nothing
but flowers in the T.B. sanatorium
before she died at fifteen, forty
years ago. The new tenants have dug up
the shrub roses, repainted the coral
porch white, bordered the edge
in ox-eye sunflowers. My mother
and I drive past slowly. Only
the porch light glows. The windows
dark. My mother wonders if her deaf
Siamese still walks the piano keys
at night. If the mailbox exhales
her father’s cigar smoke, her old
maiden name. But it’s a new box,
and the flowers are rooted somewhere
we can’t reach. They bleach
to ghosts in the groundwater. No,
she hisses, as I hop from the passenger’s
side—pocketknife drawn—sever
one sunflower’s head. When I return,
slam the car door, she floors it,
holds out her one free hand.