Bruce Guernsey

The potato that ate all its carrots, can see in the dark like a mole, its eyes the scars from centuries of shovels, tines. May spelled backwards because it hates the light, pawing its way, padding along, there in the catacombs.

Someone has opened a giant map and with the tips of our fingers, each of us suddenly blind, we track the black cold of this monument for names we know like finding a route home. Lost here this damp spring morning, the cherries exploding like the fourth of July, we wonder how many maps of Viet Nam sold those years, so many strange sounding places. One of us holds a magnifying glass to McCarroll, McMorris, McNabb, small print in the polished stone, the way a neighbor, say, in Neoga, Illinois might have done, late at night searching that faraway land on his kitchen table, hearing again the morning paper thump against the front door, that boy on his bike in the dark grown and gone—what was his name, that kid from down the block?— Khe Sanh, Da Nang, Hanoi. --for PFC William "Willie" Searle

How must it be to be moss, that slipcover of rocks?— imagine, greening in the dark, longing for north, the silence of birds gone south. How does moss do it, all day in a dank place and never a cough?— a wet dust where light fails, where the chisel cut the name.

As my mother’s memory dims she’s losing her sense of smell and can’t remember the toast blackening the kitchen with smoke or sniff how nasty the breath of the dog that follows her yet from room to room, unable, himself, to hear his own bark. It’s thus they get around, the wheezing old hound stone deaf baying like a smoke alarm for his amnesiac mistress whose back from petting him is bent forever as they shuffle towards the flaming toaster and split the cindered crisp that’s left.

You move around me expertly like the good, round Italian barber I went to in Florence, years before we met, his scissors a razor he sharpened on a belt. But at first when you were learning, I feared for my neck, saw my ears like sliced fruit on the newspapered floor. Taking us back in time, you cleverly clipped my head in a flat-top. The years in between were styles no one had ever seen, or should see again: when the wind rose half my hair floated off in feathers, the other half bristling, brief as a brush. In the chair, almost asleep, I hear the bright scissors dancing. Hear you hum, full-breasted as Aida, carefully trimming the white from my temples, so no one, not even I, will know.

Winter mornings driving past I’d see these kids huddled like grouse in the plowed ruts in front of their shack waiting for the bus, three small children bunched against the drifts rising behind them. This morning I slowed to wave and the smallest, a stick of a kid draped in a coat, grinned and raised his red, raw hand, the snowball packed with rock aimed at my face.