Gary Fincke
Monogamous This morning, the lesson of the small, but athletic, male anglerfish, who can outswim the female for the old reason of necessity. Like each of his brothers, he suffers from dependency, his speed a desperate gift. Pursuit is abundant, but she looms five times his size, a final exam for ingenuity. Where safety is absent, opportunity often shouts a widespread commandment. Unable to feed himself, he must hook to her bulk, monogamous for life. Fused, he has her blood to borrow, commitment an unspoken absolute. And in return? She receives his sperm, his swimming, by now, a thing outlived. He settles for riding on her as she drifts into deep water. Her luminescence will lure the curious close enough to devour, how the beautiful often live. ** The Accomplishments of Birds Ravens remember past relationships. Crows recognize the individual voices of birds of other species, and lyrebirds, the males, can mimic any sound they hear, from cameras to car alarms, to attract quiet females for mating. Such singing in Australia, but here, for the third consecutive year, doves have chosen the central crotch of our weeping cherry, fluttering from the lawnmower and car doors slammed in the nearby driveway. For the third consecutive year, the nest has collapsed in an early summer storm, eggs strewn underneath the helpless shelter of drooping branches. Persistent, those doves, remarkable as the couple next door who are paying for pregnancy, the wife acknowledging each failure with something akin to pride, her news, just now, of the accomplishments of birds, how studies have shown that a mother hen’s screeching can wake her chicks unhatched in eggs. ** The Dim Light What my mother sewed by, the one shaded bulb over her left shoulder, her chair drawn close, teaching sacrifice in the hours between opening the vials labeled four times a day or as needed, and because it is 1959, the radio emits light with its music, the tubes glowing while she sighs so often it sounds like breathing broken only by the brief brilliance of her cry when her body shifted as she put one thing aside and reached for another. This light, a flightless bird, has always lived in a foster home where myths become biographies. In the museum of memory, we inspect webbed footprints sunk so far into the earth we nearly remember the shape of a bird so large it believed there was nothing it need fear. Like an approaching search party, the world is a face of lights. ** The Far North In such climate, there are consequences from exposing even the smallest parts of yourself to a moment of weather. This far north, without a shadow for half a life, there’s reassurance in its length extending, at last, like a brief compass. And though, at this latitude, tragedy seems inevitable, the slender grace of extraordinary can be heard, a bright, fluttering peace that settles warily upon a branch, so close just breathing startles it away. Listen. This is the brilliant country where sentences can be suspended in ice and the whisper of stars is overheard, what Siberians call the tinkling crash of words frozen and falling, the surprise of the unexpected beauty of cold. ** A History of When When my mother stopped holding her head, she carried canning jars up from the cellar. When she sat at the table, catching her breath, she snapped the ends off green beans, an hour to recover, whether the pills kicked in or not. Because who else would preserve the beans or later, the tomatoes and peaches, arranging the filled, sealed jars for winter? Who else would cook and clean, strip the beds and remake them when her headaches only simmered like soup she reheated, sipping the broth because she could keep that down and work? When she stopped moaning into her pillow. When she came out of her darkened bedroom. When she could do what needed to be done. When she could save things that needed saving until October sighed, ready to close, Castro and Kennedy rerunning on the nostalgia network, romanticized while kidney failure overwhelmed her in the bedroom with no mirrors and one radio, its clock set so far ahead that she, accordingly, outlived herself. ** The Everlasting If he used a rotary phone, a man believes he could dial the long nines to his mother’s voice, breathless from her downstairs hurry and failing heart. He’s years alone, a private isolation that whirrs like locusts. His house has learned a language he cannot translate. All morning its strange monologue chants the vowels of threat and fear. By noon the rooms darken for rain. The windows seal like lids on lungs. Light flees to where everlasting breathes promises without people. Already he is years older than the dead he wishes to heal with his hands. The familiar moans its daylong emergency song. On the kitchen table, papers and books, the small, reusable place setting. The heart of a king, he’s read, was mummified with mint and myrtle, frankincense, daisy. After centuries, it’s a thing that travels like a campaigner. In each room, the unbearable waits like a woman he’s paid for. ** Gary Fincke has published fifteen collections of poetry, including ones that have won what is now the Wheeler Prize (Ohio State), the Wheelbarrow Press Prize (Michigan State), and the University of Arkansas Poetry Prize. Individual poems have appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and other such journals. He writes fiction and nonfiction as well, and is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction. |