Then Became

        for Sylvain

© Cynthia Hogue, 2014. Originally published in TAB: a journal of poetry and poetics (2014). Used with permission.

Constructing ‘a Plausible Protagonist’

Riding home double, atop the handlebars, a dangling leg
catches spokes. Like the ticker-tape sounds
of cards flapping, like the sudden violence

done to childhood when you trust too much.

After, I remember
how we’d beg to skip church if
we went to Sunday school, if
we helped with the baby, if
we’d mow that afternoon, and the permission once given

felt like the hill rising up out of the ditch after
crossing the highway and before we walked
the half-mile home together in quiet, between
the treeline and the houses.

But, we were riding a bike & here we are walking.

And the point of this is an entirely conventional story, subtitled
“Virtue Rewarded” or “Vice Punished,” as all stories
could be subtitled. Once when retelling

the story of the bike accident, how the bike became airborne, spiraling
over me, and the soft landing of pine needles and sugar sand, I remembered
the boy jokes you’d tell me; where the punchline
always referenced my self and my kin.

Depression may be just a poorly told tale. And when I went down

into the needles & sand, you arced
over me, the back half of the bike propelled you so far forward –
and we were only lucky that no one was worse hurt, no splintered bone, no

speeding back to church to rouse the parents from the sermon, the slumber, the complacence,

to sound the alarm. When I tell the story now, all I remember is that I loved you,
and then later, I didn’t. In the sandbox
we’d spend summer hours building canals and tunnels and bridges
and running the garden hose, creating worlds beyond any of today’s simulations;

the time we found a bag of cement in the barn & decided to make it all permanent

and after transplanting minnows and crawfish from the river, we came back

the next morning and they were all dead. I sort my poems into piles, and this pile is called:
Poems Only To Be Read To Strangers.

Reprinted from All Beautiful & Useless (BlazeVOX, 2015).

Stepmother en Filipinas, ca. 1948

I.
Long before the clop-clopping of hooves
echo from the sun-baked road,
and the calesa drops off its passenger
and her groom, there will have been
a thousand chores completed.

The bride will arrive at her new home
and regally ascend to her forerunner’s
legacy on narra steps and floors
polished to ebony shine, mirroring
her long virginal skirt like lover’s
eyes lurid with desire.

And the dining table will not betray
one speck of dust—she could lick off
her dinner straight from its top.
And her dinner will be served
by an army of young servants,
sneaking peeks for signs
of approval or—Dios mio!—
displeasure, as they learn
to address her, Ima—
mother.

II.
Typhoid had robbed them of their blood
mother during the war that taught them
their sculptor father was useless
when art served no purpose but vain hope,
and beauty only attracted unwanted attention,
and it was more important to learn how
to bow low to the Hapon and say Hai!
like you meant it, unless you craved
a lusty beating, and how to carve
out a living selling poor man’s meals
from the bodega of their house.

Everyone says how lucky they were
for a young lady to want to marry
a man with seven children already.

III.
The fourteen-year old eldest daughter resents
the woman not much older than she
usurping her place as mistress of the house,
can’t think of what more a man could want
beyond a brood of obedient children
catering to his needs. Doesn’t grasp this
until that night when he orders everyone
to bed early, and the house—
thought to be dead all that time,
rises and sleepwalks.

The daughter knows,
for she heard it straight from the loose lips
of the heaving and groaning floors.

Find yourself alone in someone else’s house, nine thousand feet above your actual life, days hemmed mostly in by national forest and the wind of your own thoughts.

(He says he will die young. He says he is old. He says touch, turned take.)

Here, there is nothing to do but walk around the pastures, up mountains, along your own fence-lines. Feed the dogs in your care. Feed the feral cat, you name him Jasper, that keeps the rodents down.

(He says he is only a child. He says he was never a child. He says split. Ache.)

Coyotes sound in the night. Hear it as promise or warning; either way, hear it as a signal somehow for you. Awaken: the ridges lost in what you try to call fog, that’s what you know it as, but the name won’t stick.

(He says he is strong. He says he is naked. He says monster, innocent.)

You’re trying hard to understand love, how it can pour out of broken things. You try to understand broken, hear it as a lullaby—

Hush little baby don’t say a word