This Story
I think I’d like to die in Rhode Island someday,
wading in the bay in rotten sneakers at slack water,
my basket partly full of clams, my eyes focused
on their little air holes in the sand
on a late afternoon on a late August weekday,
with clouds herding up along the south horizon,
banking off toward Block Island and beyond,
and I will swat at a greenhead buzzing near my neck
and fall into
the slant of four o’clock sun beneath
the half-inch ripples of the incoming tide and close out
this story, except for the postscript where I’m later found
by two guys floating by in a rented canoe eating meatball subs
who took the day off to drink some beer on the bay
and never thought they’d read about themselves in the paper
or that night tell their wives about the body they found
face down in the muck and how the police questioned them
about the beer and so this story will pass from mouth
to ear across the towns I lived in, the places where I rode my
bike
to the store to buy my mother’s cigarettes and Mike Boyle’s
brother
will recall the time I broke into the school that night with Mike
and Sheryl
Pannebaker’s father will fold the newspaper in
his lap
and think it was a good thing she married a chiropractor and across
the football field near the high school a couple of kids will stop
laughing and look up at the sky for no reason while out on the
bay
a sudden piece of wind will blow in from the sea and the spot
near the shore where I felt this story collapse in my chest
will be commemorated by mud and the stink of low tide
and the gray sails of circling gulls.
(Originally published in The Atlanta Review)
|
