Two Poems

Mercy

Duck Benson every day lined us up
out on the gravel recess yard. He stood
so close you could smell, as your turn came,

the grease and cinnamon on his breath.
Duck laced his fingers with yours,
he counted down. The object of his game

was to break your wrists. To turn and wrench
until you cried, “Mercy.” And we all of us
did. Some only turning red. Others

fighting back tears. A few falling
to their knees. “Mercy,” we begged
of the twitchy, dirty-jeaned deity

who was Duck Benson. “Mercy,
mercy!” Three years older but still
in our same grade, Duck was missing

his left thumb. A barb-wire scar
laddered his neck. Thirty years on I rise
from the garden, rinse with hose-water

each of my unblemished hands.
Late afternoon, and beyond the fence
I hear them cursing, kicking windfall plums —

the usual, slouching pack of boys
that plagues this or any neighborhood,
the too big ones, the fidgety ones,

the ones with their hands always
on their friends. I want to line them up,
line them up and teach them

how to ask. What I want
for each terrified one, and all of us,
is some assurance that God and the world

are as good as Duck Benson —
that after the pain, after the breaking,
it will be, as it was, granted.





The Call for the Bone Marrow Transplant Match Came Two Days after He Died

And she left her three children
eating sugar cereal in front of the television,

and at 85 mph burned along the winter highway,
the many improvident miles to the city,

where for a long time he had been sick,
where for a long time she had been marshaling

teeth, nails, wings, fires in her eyes.
Loud, dirty signs. Old snow piled on street corners.

And the untenanted shadows downtown,
the avenue women not even

in their cropped leather jackets and denim skirts
shivering. Mid-afternoon, the hospital lot

as full as it ever was, she circled twice
and drove slowly home, kept closing her eyes,

the long fields of scrub and sage so bright with ice
you couldn't look at them.