Читать книгу Dead Girl Dancing - Mike L. Nichols - Страница 10

Grave Children

See the child grown. Lonely,

in a pasture empty. He wavers.

He wears his snowman sweater,

not warm, itchy. He knows the cold

is gnawing past his edges but he doesn’t feel

that. The anger sometimes ambushes him

while he stands shivering to breathe lilacs

on the almost summer lawn where she is

buried – untouchable – fifty feet below.

He knows what the cold does. Shrunken scrotum,

sticking eyelashes, nose froze in snot-sicles.

He should go. Nothing here to hold but memory.

And on January’s squeaking snow

memory’s mouth ch-ch-chatters, shatters teeth.

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They told him, “She has gone. Don’t worry.”

Lethal, like Martin Riggs you’ll see her again.

Later – much later. For now stand and suffer

the little children to come unto you.

Their memories like road-squirrel’s bellies

squashed by fatly pulsing vacancies,

Cracking bone Oozing marrow.

When you forget, the absence blind-sides you.

Better to remember then, and smile, silly.

Tamp down your erupting rage.

Swallow that curdled milk of malice.

Her aspect now an emptiness. Death is distance

and a nice shearing will strip away scratchy sweaters,

exposing the poorly mended wounds of these

witnesses, of lambs led to slaughter.