I Was 16
I remember how you looked in your clean white strait jacket:
a 90-pound finch, wings pinned useless at your sides.
House of rivers, house of reeds, summer mornings voiced by redwings.
How we hid the scissors, hid the knives, lied
under doctor’s orders to fool your fiery mind.
House of suffocating summer heat. House of sorrowful tides.
I remember the sunny day they came for you, a trance of alibis,
capture construed as rescue.
Great Blue Heron stock still in the water, yes
to save you,
we betrayed you.
Eyes of the hunter, hunter eyes trained on murky depths; life beneath the surface furtive, miraculous
how we survived, like sticks hurled the way you taught us into the flood-gorged stream, sinking under the stone bridge, popping up on the other side.
A glimmer world of ebb and flow;
until the day I die, I will see your face as they forced you into the ambulance,
things no more, no less than they are:
and the terror in your eyes. How we hid behind dark trees watching, steeped in our own blank fear. And a long year in a beige house beside a tidal inlet, no outlet for the pain,
just the mystery of other creatures—breathing, feeding, somehow singing…
(MARGIE)
