1/30/2022 Poetry by Al Ortolani cuatrok77 CC
The Poorest County in Kansas I built my daughters a rabbit hutch, scrapped together from scabbed lumber along the wall of the garage. I nailed them with sixteen penny nails from the bottom of my toolbox, and then, tacked the roof with eights from broken pickets in the burn pile. Many I had to unbend with my hammer, tapping them on a brick until they resembled the straight lines they once held. Chicken wire and steel cloth was a problem. The hardware store was closed on Easter, the churches pew-filled, the shops shut on the bluest of Blue Sundays. The rabbits, one white, one black, had arrived that morning in a cardboard box, nesting in a gym towel. I drove the alley in my pickup truck, hunting cast off wire. Finally, behind a row of duplexes, picked over for copper tubing and galvanized steel, I found a small roll of garden fencing, saved from rust by the angle of a fallen roof. I doubled the wire on the bottom to keep the rabbit’s feet from falling through the gaps, eyeing enough space for their pellets to drop into the berm they’d build throughout the spring and summer. When it cooled in autumn, I raked them into the tomato bed, behind the crepe myrtle, back where the paint is peeling, where even a rabbit’s hill cools until used. Cricket Shoes There’s something out of reach in October, so far beyond me that I cannot put a name to it. It waits on the path through the trees, the damp leaves rich with gold and orange, in some cases the stems standing upright, also bright, also colored. Thoreau said, the leaves teach us how to die, but I am not so lucky, for I have learned only to want more. Even more of the falling, the inaudible gasp of the leaf letting go from the branch, the brief twirling as it catches the light, the loosened shoelaces, the wallered-out eyelets, the cricket taps its shoes before the first freeze, the tune singular, as much laced to earth as tied to hope. Would You Would You If your friends jumped from a bridge… The answer of course was yes, jump, always jump, arms and legs flailing into the sky without a moon. The water below, below the bridge, below the moonless sky, split by a stone, the guess of depth. Finally, a silhouette on a bridge alone, standing, turning the truth. Alone on the railing, with the truth, the bitch of the truth, not knowing the leap, the splash, all the while the accusations from downriver rising like a nation, up from the muddy river, the voices of ducks, carp, and cottonmouths. Al Ortolani is the Manuscript Editor for Woodley Press in Topeka, Kansas, and has directed a memoir writing project for Vietnam veterans across Kansas in association with the Library of Congress and Humanities Kansas. He is a 2019 recipient of the Rattle Chapbook Series Award. After 43 years of teaching English in public schools, he currently lives a life without bells and fire drills in the Kansas City area. 4/1/2022 01:20:52 pm
Yes, Al, enjoyed these three poems and lingered a while on these lines: There’s something out of reach in October, / Comments are closed.
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