Eight Lives from the City of Enchantment

I. Timothy Martin

Phillip parks near the diamond
in afternoon sun. Twin boys hop
out and run full speed to the field
where they straightaway
begin throwing strikes and balls
past imaginary batters while
waiting for the team to arrive.

***
Phillip takes Mary’s arm and helps
her from the car. She is bent with grief.
She asks again why the boy was taken.
“Accidents, Mary. There’s no why to it.”
“But, why Tim? Why not Justin?
He had so many ways
to make me cry. This would be
just one more.”

***
A deep chill settles over the playground
No children there to memorialize
other children, other days.
No sound but the winter wind.
Elsewhere, a brother’s life proceeds—
wearisome, shallow, grasping.


II. Raymond Edgerton

Raymond pecks at his keyboard
writing letters that will be ignored.
Carefully, he composes his argument
against today’s injustice that will pass for law
on Capitol Hill. He guesses it will get a glance
and a note: “Response 5 with full sig.”

***
Looking down the long barrel, sight centered,
elevation raised, Raymond squeezes the trigger.
He sees blood and knows he has scored.
He sees the hatted men in suits
running toward him. He knows he will
die soon. This is his legacy.
His most urgent agendum fulfilled,
he wants only rest.


***
Not even a footnote marks the act.
The object of his hatred
is of little significance
in the story of their times.
Two cogs in a sadistic
machine: history.



III. Janet Hilliard

Janet puts on an album of Mozart concerti
so her students will hear and maybe
notice what she listens to for pleasure.
Can they allow themselves to be so divergent?
Drink the joy of music as she has for so
many years? Or will they think it too far
beyond punk?

***
Instantly, she knows she has opened the door
to mayhem. He looks at her coldly and says,
“Elevator music to get me up and take you down.”
She parries with words, feckless words.
His violence is swift and overpowering.
Only his heavy breathing now.
The recorded sounds of the piano
cover his leaving.

***
In his cell, he thinks of her—
she is the only one he ever thinks about.
Something about her won’t let go—
her fending with words and music.
“Listen to the music,” she said.
Over and over as he went mad.
“Listen to the music!”
It won’t let go of him now—
or ever.


IV. Alice Kristenson

Alice reads intently from a novel and wonders
why the writer takes the reader through
all this unnecessary childhood terrain.
Were she the author, she would have been
direct and less self serving in the narrative.
The mass from her lower bowel
is gone now and reading soothes
the constant questions.

***
Thirteen years, a survivor.
Pride of her surgeon’s practice.
Now, Alice struggles to breathe,
to keep blood flowing, to squeeze
the hands of visitors who wish
to be elsewhere than standing over her.
Too tired to read, in the quiet night,
she recalls, again and again,
all that childhood terrain,
picking through it for clues, for meaning,
some evidence of love.

***
The county librarian proposes
naming the new library
the Alice Kristenson Library.
A wasted favor
to name a library after a patron.
Commissioners choose instead
to name it for a dead politician—
to some, a martyr,
to some, a philistine.
“Enjoy the irony, Alice.
It’s what we get
for living the way we do.”




V. Gaylon Jensen

Gaylon takes the field with eight
other boys. Fear of failure is all
he feels. Joy of sport has been
numbed. On Monday night, high fly
balls fell behind him after
he turned his back and ran desperately
toward the outfield fence—thrice.
His teacher used the word in class
when they talked about the game.
Now he hears it from
the dugout.

***
Traveling now in the company of scholars,
he still carries the overwhelming fear of failure.
Experimental results that will stagger the world
are just beyond his reach. Good theory deserves
cooperative data. Just for a while, until the
instrument is improved; the time is now.
The race is intense; a little tweak; a little fudge.
Then, a little guilt, depression, suicide.
His findings stand for thirty years.

***
The scholar who finds him out
leaves his reputation intact,
lets the new data overwhelm the old.
No need to punish the dead
or give comfort to the living
who prefer no ambiguity in
other people’s suicides.
Leave this one without the data
they crave.



VI. Jerome Ricardo

Jerome reads the editorials first,
front page next, then the sports,
and, finally, the comics.
In this way he orders his life:
opinion, fact, muscle and humor—
the four elements of politics. He wishes
he could fit the common mold.
Those who do seem happier and,
oddly, have more friends.

***
It occurs to him in college—
a minor adjustment:
muscle, opinion, rumor, malice.
No more need for fact or humor;
politics is bold and violent.
He moves ahead at a pace
his mother finds troublesome
only because he seems so adrift.
Then he steps in front
of an assassin’s bullet.

***
Curious they would name a library
for someone who had so little truck
with fact and humor. Another like him
approaches the building in darkness,
hammers an opening in the brick facade
that supports the night book drop,
douses the stacks with gasoline,
exits and throws in a match.
Thwarted: a new librarian,
new building, new books—
dangerous books
on evolutionary biology,
observational cosmology.
And a book against
all war.



VII. Gentry Davidson

Gentry is a man of God by profession.
He knows how common he is,
understands original sin, accepts that it
applies to clergy as well as to laity.
Still, his heart aches to be better than
the people in the pews. Taking money
for something means you should be
better at it. But, when your line of work
is altruistic virtue, it means you
must be worse. Cruel paradox.

***
Trapped inside this little box,
he moves ever toward
a righteous understanding of the
potential God provides through
His material blessings. Called to more
power, he moves to higher pulpits,
bigger flocks, more admiring
parishioners. The stroke that takes him
is just like the one that
took down Gilbert, the banker
who prayed loudly, gave little.

***
When he dies, his congregation
makes it clear: he was a saint.
His bishop had not known;
Father Davidson confessed
only his indiscretions.
Among the parishioners,
there is one with little to say—
either in praise or condemnation.
Quietly, his life proceeds.
Quietly.







VIII. Robert Fordice

Robby stops to smell the wisteria
on the way home from the five and dime.
Stillness and heat create aroma so intense
he will recall it fifty years later,
feel the hot pavement under his bare feet,
and see the heavy air shimmer in waves.

***

Profound doubt rules his years.
He achieves no greatness.
Commonplace and circumstance
bound his life of duty
and leave death’s quiet hand reaching
through the days, pressing toward
collapse of the countervailing poise
of pledge and passion.

***

Few attend his funeral.
Those who go
mourn the loss of a life
rare in its balance. Fewer understand
its fulcrum: reason.
Robert passes, keeping the neutrality
his devout friends disdain.
He neither asks nor offers
prayers of intercession.
He neither invites nor resists
death’s allure—
duty and desire,
terminally in balance.