On Storytelling: The Quiet One or the Coward




On Storytelling:
The Quiet One or the Coward

Here Aeneas dares to hope he has found some haven
and, after all his hard straits; to trust again
in better times.
                                Doc
                                Mary Doria Russell

I’m reading about Doc Holliday
and his treacherous
cough, how it drove him west
to seek the restive cure.  I’m reading he
was quiet good with teeth
and easy too and how
if you knew he was pulling at the root
of you he was always so courteous too, and he had it
out and in the tin
really a big ole pearl you made
your own self all these years

and he gave it
back to you even though
it was mostly ok, even though
there was a considerable trade
in teeth especially
if they were clean.  I’m reading
he was born with a cleft
lip and palate and his uncle
after months of eye-dropper milk
in a shot glass, snipped and stitched it
back, closing the divide, into a scar forever.
How his own
mother kept him alive on that milk
and her own devotion and husband

rejection.  And I love knowing it
happens, even if it’s history, and I love
knowing it is possible and a dearly wanted
thing, a shaped thing, the way clay
is shaped or maybe clouds on those windy
days they make everybody face them
and most people do, most folks tilt back
and wait and make up a story of one
or two dragons and they’re safe
after they rage and telling it they’re amazed
when one dragon takes

the shape and angle of an angel
but one wing’s gone, it’s broke off
and they make up:
when it fell from the sky
through the ice and it was shredded
by the time it made it
to the ground and was a wisp of a thing
a baby that chance may deliver
into the hands of a mediocre woman
and an even more mediocre mother and she turned out
her children wing by wing
and she faded from them or they faded
they took back
to the sky and made it
on their own, they shapeshifted into
something razed, unrecognizable: a kind of gun-
slinger who draws quicker than water
and falls just as fast after he’s shot
in the back but in his defense
he didn’t see it
coming how could he
not facing the enemy

and don’t we know now
how it all went down when the smoke
rolls over the dead?  Don’t we know now
they’re made to be speechless and how they’re made
that way: to the storied teeth and bone?

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