April 11, 2007: Johnny Cash in the Afterlife, Bronwen Densmore
Johnny Cash in the Afterlife
Bronwen Densmore
At first you wonder where June has got to
and then you manage to forget
the circumstance of your own arrival.
Prior to here you were where? Suffice to say
that you were finished with some task
or another. Around the corner something flutters
and you’d chase it if you were feeling your old self,
though right now you’re not sure what you’d do
with something living if you caught it.
You hunker down and keep an eye out,
remember how when you were a boy
you trapped rabbits in a baited net
and waited for your father, who killed them
with just his thumb and two fingers.
You are forgetting the names of these things
already. You would like to describe wings beating
as warm, and possessed of smell,
but when you open your mouth it’s just air
getting out, you think screen door,
and when sound finally comes
it seems animal to you. If your wife were here
you might put your ear to her and know better
but for now it’s just you and the whoosh,
whoosh of that shadow. If you wrote it down
it might come back but you don’t mind,
not sure you really want it now.
For all you know it could have been owls
you were tracking back then, as a boy,
baskets that you wove to keep them in.
[I am such a sucker for what-if poems, story poems, and second person. And I love how centering this on Johnny Cash and those kinds of boyhood memories means there’s no chance of it becoming overly precious. I really like the drift of this, how things get vaguer and vaguer as the poem goes along, how language itself seems to be fading.]
More like this:
Mummingbird, Bronwen Densmore
The Heaven of Animals, James Dickey
A year ago: Anne Hathaway, Carol Ann Duffy
Two years ago: Sleep Positions, Lola Haskins
