Eternity's Lullaby
       

I've got car payments again. Today I kicked a clump of frozen snow & road salt to the
ground from behind the tire. It was like following a rickety fence through white-out

conditions, digging for cash in a field in your snowsuit . . . "Good gracious," he'd said, un-
enthusiastic, fingers-deep in my mouth, the dentist . . . It was 1967 & I'd related a tale about

fishing—an errant cast, a hooked gull. Nervous laughter. I was 8. Deep roots & the little white
stumps were hunkering low, teeth that would not be yanked. Now I've got bone spurs, dust like

radiation on a far-away planet, where an ailing lizard-like sentient being rocks herself asleep
or away. I don't know how much Novocain they shot me with but it didn't work. The light

in those neighborhoods is still infra-red, extraction by extraction. The reel to reel tape flies
backwards, a too-simple stoppage of time. I'm sick of the mud rolling over other mud on its

way through the ruts at the gas station—a lavatory, they call it, bone-cold in December, the white
curve of a jaw angling out to meet the black road, the swinging chandeliers over the dinner

table with playing cards spread out beside rolling papers & a bottle of Jameson's, orange flash
of a snow plow past midnight lighting the interior walls. What's left to lose? Your love of pain?

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Copyright © 2019 David Dodd Lee All rights reserved
from Sou'wester
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission