Coming Clean

Up
At Aspet
August Saint Gaudens
Cornish, NH

Coming Clean

No one who does not live with constant pain

can imagine the toll it takes.  The way it grinds you

down.  The sheer damnable tedium of it.

                                                                Epitaph: A Novel

                                                                of the O. K. Corral

               

                                                                Mary Doria Russell

Somehow the pressure of the spin was enough

to contain the ink in pen, left in the pocket, put in
the washing machine unwittingly.  The barrel opens
only to two pieces of clothing:: a face

cloth now with one plot of purple, a dot

that could be the pupil of some accusatory eye.

And one smear, like a gunshot of a wound rubbed down

the leg, a shock stuck through, though maybe

it’s just play, stuff kids do after the movie

is over and the hold their wooden guns up

and call the shots.  And after a few washes everything

starts to fade, and in time nothing’s seen

at all, or if it is it’s ignored, it’s gone on with, it’s

decided they are  not to be worn now on

more formal days, the way school clothes are reduced

to play after the year is done.  Remember

the day we came home and the blood

was on the rug and it was something
new and we didn’t

understand where it’d come from at first or how

it got there?  And the car was gone and the truck too

so that meant he was at the cove working on his boat

and she was out on the road or maybe drove

off it and in some ditch somewhere though none

of us said that out loud, like it would bump
everything we’d built and stacked neatly around us.
And we were good at it because looking in

from the road no one could tell there was anything

going on at all, just a bunch of kids going out to play

and waiting until he came home to go looking

for her to prove us wrong or she coming home to prove

us willing to cover the blood up with as much

scrub as we could muster, with nothing
about how it got there.  And though

we know it wasn’t a gun, of course it wasn’t, he didn’t

come home and find her drunk again and he didn’t

say he’d had enough just about enough of his life

coming undone and so before it all unraveled

forever like those balls of yarn she roped together (skein

after skein) and rolled them out into the dirt

driveway, we soaped the spot, we scrubbed

we put our back into it like the cartoon looser

told the gravedigger to do, we brought almost

all of it up and we did good covering for her or him

whoever came home first, whoever needed it
the most.

Banister at Aspet
Augustus Saint Gaudens
Cornish, NH