Bill Cushing, 5 września 2012
Slowly circling,
the pelican
drops like a stone
into water.
Then climbing the
air, he stops, and
with a single
motion of wings,
glides on the wind.
Bill Cushing, 5 września 2012
Things did not turn out
as perfectly as we had hoped. When
the doctors
extracted him
from the womb, there he was
a twisted pretzel of
a person, this child
who was
to be
perfect,
shaking and bloody
as a wounded bird and
not much different:
from the bony shoulders,
like broken wings,
crooked arms splayed up
to the curled hands
that seemed jammed
under a quivering
chin
attached, haphazardly,
to a crooked head.
Hips
perpendicular to
a withered torso,
legs running
up the sides of a pruney chest—
all these deformities
from blood that had
clotted in the brain:
a stroke. So,
a malady
of the elderly became
his personal anomaly.
Blood soaked, crooked,
crying, and
brain damaged:
this was how we greeted
our son,
yet
from those bodily barricades
and
out of that
unquenchable panic
came
a boy who
did not interrupt a family,
did not join a family,
but who created a family.
Bill Cushing, 5 września 2012
Torchlit halls linked galleries
and ballrooms. The castle itself
linked the banks of the river
with black-and-white tiles
that felt minuets and waltzes.
Later, pawns crossed the checkerboard
that was then scuffed by
the jackboots of soldiers
of a “thousand year Reich”
that lasted only twelve—
a fraction of the fuehrer’s
promised prediction.
Paying the Loire tribute,
Cher rises in the northwest,
then flows across a plateau
to join the Yevre at Vierzon.
Eighteenth century masons
built the chateau on pilings
of a sixteenth century mill:
a castle more squat than wide.
Taking flight from former
Gothic weight, the structure
would later offer flight
to the builders' descendants.
They had no way of knowing,
these workmen who joined
two shores with stone,
what avenue they would leave.
As they built this architectural
bridge on arched columns,
they girded generations backward
and forward. They did not see
things that would be yet
still supplied a path to freedom
for their great-grandchildren’s
grandchildren.
Bill Cushing, 5 września 2012
A shape appears
and is gone,
comes into view,
disappears, until,
cresting the hill,
the spot
blotting the sun,
a cartload of hay,
takes shape.
Emerging,
the wagon,
oxen-drawn, a juggernaut pulled
by two thousand pounds,
rolls between fields--
grinding dirt,
crushing stones.
Sweating flanks
of coarse,
matted hair
cause slow,
rhythmic hammering,
dull thunder
as hooves pound earth.
The ground moves
to the sound
of these hardened
timpani.
Beast and wagon pass,
processional,
as if solemn,
and then recede
slowly
out of sight.
A wake is left--
strong pungent odor
of musk
mixed
with the sweet sharpness
of the cut stalks
being carried
to the village beyond.
Bill Cushing, 5 września 2012
They flock
to the park
cloaked in black,
perched on benches in the Winter sun,
the bills of their ball caps, like beaks,
dip in and out.
Like grackles
surrounding bread crumbs,
the ancient Armenians
ease their emotional baggage—
too young to remember
but old enough to recall those
who lived through
or died from
the Turkish carnage.
Surrounding the tables
filled with scattered dominoes,
on Christmas eve,
the old men chatter
about the old country
and its new destruction,
moving and
connecting
the ivory bones
with brittle fingers.
This little plot is now
their patch of earth,
and as
territorial
as the chastising mocking birds,
they chase strangers
from the grounds,
children
from weathered monkey bars.
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