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(“Getting away with murder”, Quest Magazine, March 1984)
a child shrieks me awake
the thought of poets rumbles
in the aftermath of tea & danish,
absorbed by the quality of this or that
divinely difficult form;
seductive father slips quickly into
a plain brown wrapper amid
tickets, torn notes & grocery receipts
in the dead zone of my life
I find apple-cores, dull rituals and
the endless passage of unmarked moments,
out-of-date addresses of friends barely known,
a bad movie with good indians,
and some little-known canadiana:
dead children don’t count.
and i wake to the sound of
a child shrieking of hematoma,
severed vessels in tiny necks,
the pain of a thigh that has separated,
and fused, and separated again,
of bruises in an endless rain of blues,
of breathed-in vomit, choking
anger, walls, and snapping ribs.
the helplessness of soft bones
thrown like sacks of garbage
at a red brick rage. but
dead children don’t count.
© 1984 L.A. Wolanskyj
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