A Shame

 

A Shame

 

                             When you are tired or terrified

your voice slips back into its old first place

and makes the sound your shades make there…

 

                                           Seamus Heaney

                                           The Loaning

 

What’s yellow of the last of summer’s mid-August

is goldenrod, or the odd lily.  And I’d like to be the one

 

to see it in a rose.  But mostly it’s the goldenrod

and I think didn’t the field beside the lane

 

leading to the neighbor’s old house boast of so much

it was its own sea almost, it was electric with

 

tiny stinging things—they seemed content to be left

there beneath the blossoms and tolerated

 

my soft walk past on the path that was rising

thick and invisible all those summer months, and my

 

brief years of being and needing – feet to grass –

each other had, like the time it all, (everything, really, had),

 

blurred the way a cataracting eye blurs.  And yet,

if I walked down that lane today and made

 

my way to the gawping foundation where once

an old house, (burned down now) and a decaying barn

 

floor, where once a deserted Cadillac, a neglected

Lincoln with her fascinating suicide

 

doors (and wouldn’t you know, goldenrod grew

between the slabs of the foundation, exhuberant through 

 

the seats) I bet every step would be clarity, like it is now

somehow, and the blossoms touching the pink sky

 

of the palm of my hand, and that man, dead now

thirty plus years, after having teased my knees

 

apart and eased his way in while something sweet

melted in my throat, while my mother

 

drank her day to the end of its length, never

questioning the stained washcloths

 

bloody and mashed with twigs and weeds, fists

and fists of weeds. Goldenrod he called it,  the mucous

 

of my sin.  This five-year-old.  Hollowed. Grown

quiet and cold as November. And all the while the sun

 

going down, going into the inevitable

autumn, into rust, into the mouth

 

of God and shut there, silent as stealth,

silent as iron rusting, and firm as toffee that’s gripped

 

and perched against tense lips: from thumb

smelling like bum, but dimly, and a hungry,

 

hungry (remember, reader, five

year old’s) tongue.

 

 

*In Ulster, a loaning is a lane or a track