" Eight Futures "
He chose a limb, strong enough to bear the weight of his body—
with knots, with character, one empty of a parable. Raspy voices
gathered dust under stars reunited with his brothers’ eyes.
They meditated, kindling fire. A cat gutted and stretched, picked clean
of bone and marrow, he would return like this, nine chances, eight times more.
A grackle watches while he drinks a final gulp of water. He wonders
how he drew this tragic part. His lips had squashed grapes bursting
with sweetness, lingered between a lover’s breasts. These were doomed
by prophecies and he imagines they will secure someone else’s fate.
A mysterious calamity unknowingly sucking on a new mother’s nipple.
He would become a painter, drip dreams and melt clocks. A farmer
raising wheat in barren Missouri. Before he was finished, he was to be
a patriot raising a flag on a rock in Iwo Jima. A housewife, or perhaps
a famous writer, one who would stick her head in the oven—God knows
betrayal takes on strange incarnations.
For now he is simply a man. One who has sold out, made it easy
to live a life filled with sweet carp fried crisply the way he’d been taught—
by a friend whose future would be secured wandering Cyprus, rags flapping
like a taut clothesline.
The rest was easy. His task didn’t involve signals.
Leaning forward listening for a cock crowing three times, a directive
from his Master. This was not a future gig, struggling to sell used cars
in a lot in Des Moines. He needed to finish it as it would be written
down. Men and women sometimes prone to wild exaggeration.
He was to find a tree with a solid enough trunk, a steady limb that wouldn’t break
under the burden of all their futures, a tree strong enough to bear his guilty heart.
© 2004 Laurie Byro
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