Finalist for the 2015 Driftless Prize in Poetry Learn more >
Edgar Kunz: Blue
Because Cole Thompson fell two stories
through the skylight over the dining room
and lay crumpled on the wood floor
me and the other waitstaff waxed on Sundays,
and because the sprinkler pipes tore out
of the ceiling when he fell, tripping
the fire alarm and spraying salt water
over the place settings and chairs, the siren
pealing over every speaker in that
tinderbox hotel with its sheetrock walls
packed with newspaper, and because all
the guests were rushed to the granite
breakwater that divides New Hampshire
from Maine and connects our island
to the island named for the man
who wrecked his ship discovering it,
it took nearly two hours for someone
to find him there, sprawled on his back
in a canvas workshirt and jeans, hauling in
ragged breaths and murmuring
to himself, and another hour before
the helicopter touched down in the yard
and the EMTs loaded him onto a gurney
and flew him to Boston General.
When Cole came back the next summer,
he limped into the front office
with a different face, a quad cane
he carried everywhere, a jaw that clicked
when he talked. He said he didn't know
why he was on the roof in the first place.
Said he was glad he couldn't remember.
And so the rest of us needed
to imagine it: the moments
leading up to the fall, and the moments
just after, having passed through the skylight
and sprawled on his back on the waxed
and polished floor, to wonder if he looked up
at the ruptured plastic piping
and the splintered glass, if he understood
it was the route his body took when it left
the charted world, if he saw with his one
undamaged eye the rails of sunlight
and the salt water pouring down,
the framed sky, not a single cloud in it.
EDGAR KUNZ is from
Massachusetts. His work appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, The Missouri
Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Blackbird, and
other places. In the fall, he will begin a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford
University.
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