After the Service
The Amphitheatre
Castle White Apartments
After the service was over
and the children had all gone home,
I waited for you to get me
all afternoon on a Sunday
in fall, as the traffic roared on
like a Pentecost, and the sky
was a hazy premonition
of every profound hurt to come.
How strong I felt! what a lesson
I’d learned: no one needs anyone
really. Tossing loose cement stones
against a crumbling cement wall
in the parking lot, as the crows
bounced into the branches; waiting
all day on a Sunday for you
to come find me and take me home,
whenever that hour should come.
Up from an evening’s sleep
in the communal room
full of friends, the window
was a slate of churning
snow. When the storm was through
we went outside into
a flood of moonlit drifts,
feet numbing, lips rent, breath
adhering into ice
on our new beards, our brows
and our lashes. By way
of the Catholic graveyard,
profaning only when
our boots found the crowns of
buried tombstones. Growing
silent without knowing
the reason why. Plowing
wide lanes through fine sere snow
between rows of black firs
that arched with still more snow
like grief. Into the well
of the amphitheatre
in the back yard of some
rich man’s house. To wait here
speaking softly often
on Nature, Art, that dome
of abyss above. We
shouldn’t have been here but
we never got caught. Once
a light blinked on inside
the rich man’s house. We saw
him peer out at us as
we stared back at him. Then
he turned out the light.
The transistor radio
beneath the pillow. The faux
accent. The unforeseen guests.
This suffering pile of messed
white sheets and burning light motes
rolling in a ray. The throat
of the blind hallway that leads
outside, where the lily pads
hum, encased in their glassine,
earthen veins. And the feathering
ferns beneath keening tree limbs
coiling down into their twinned
likenesses. Scales of ivy
chattering the university’s
emerald courtyard, where the young
men and women laugh. The lungs
of the missing student were
full of water. My mother
was waiting for me to fail
and come back home. The blind hall
-way back to those twisted white
sheets. The radio as night
fell. This consoling novel
I’d purchased of magical
realism.
Dan O’Brien’s poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Margie, Greensboro Review, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. He is a former Hodder Fellow in playwriting at Princeton University, as well as a 2011 resident at the Rockefeller Center’s Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy. He lives in Los Angeles. Visit his website at danobrien.org.
