Keeper
Keeper
“Film it in sepia”
Seamus
Heaney
The
Wood Road
Those morning moments,
during sun-
rise, when the pines
and oaks go to copper,
glow in the opening
of the day, I know
we could’ve grown up
in the same places, Heaney
and me, if only I’d’ve been born
earlier. Or if there
weren’t
The Troubles
in the same town on the same
road. Today, those ‘slow,
children playing’ signs are
rusted, overgrown. The
last time
I walked down the right side
of that road I saw (though
almost didn’t see) that pock-
marked rect-
angle, all
the yellow almost sun,
and the stamped, like
Braille, relief of the words
that any alert driver would
know were announced after
the drive by. The sign-post
was over-
grown with all the ditch
flowers summer could spew:
iris and her thick tongues, wild
day-lilies and the start of cat-
o-nine tails close. Homegrown
holy
of holies. Against
the post, through
all that grass, a bike
rested against the pole.
Its spokes were gone
red and the spoke-
nipples too,
and the wheel frame,
and I have to say, seeing it
alongside the goldenrod stalks
it was abstract and camouflage
enough I might not have
known what my eyes
were trying to buy and own.
So. It must’ve been
thirty
five or forty years ago now,
a boy on his bike passed a car
going too slow on tight
curve rounding the salt-
marsh. And something
else
caught his attention, it must’ve,
he could’ve, couldn’t he’ve,
quick enough boy, avoided
the right-of-way truck coming.
And like Heaney’s niece
Rachel, or Frost’s boy in Out,
Out…there was no first
refusal. The child is
struck
and dead just the same,
though there’s debate
even after all these years exactly
who’s to blame, or worse still,
who keeps the signs free,
perfectly readable
lamp-posts aligned? What want
to be eagle scout
will earn his mettle and go, post-hole
to post hole, and slug the ditches
to be able
to stitch his badges
doing
what his uncle would’ve done
if he’d not been riding
that bike?
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