From the polite distance
of a window,
the Great Dane lay
with its brain open
out on a table.
Like a trapped dinner
guest, the powder-brown
bat came alive in a jar.
A real doubleheader!
The wings pink with fright,
a small thing, ferocious,
small death hunching in us all,
it did not say, “Come in,
fear me.” It looked sad,
a little like a violin,
on the sunny side of the jar,
waiting to be tested for rabies.
Half student, half janitor,
I wait to tested, think
twice, knock on the door.
In the library john
once, a bully grabbed me
hard by the collar.
His white fist carried
cure for lechery.
It pricked the melancholy
of me, and he
was tested for rabies.
A kind man moves through the room
with a cane. His hair is white.
His microscope bites through darkness.
The small bright thing in the jar
feeds his mind. “Come dog with me,”
he whistles through the dark.
Along a highway in Vietnam,
was it dead man’s curve?,
reason swerved at the wheel. Then,
center of bloody attention,
dog, we fed you, triggers pulled,
your final scrap of pain, darkness.
Inside the room a mind
behind a microscope and
a Great Dane no longer,
but bait for good research.
Half janitor, half student,
I have no cane, no cure
for this fear.
Once a grackle swooped
close to my shoulder.
In a dream the blue-black
head glistening
like the hair
of a Chinese girl.
Tomorrow what rabid skunk
or squirrel will click
its marble eyes to charm me?
Tomorrow wishing for warmer skin,
a cleaner kill, not entrails
spread out on comic strips
over tables.
I polish chrome, pick up
waste for a living.
I look in myself all day.
Tomorrow a kind man
will pray for me.
His shoulder falls
to one side when he talks.
I stoop for his basket,
but basket is empty.
Out the fifth-floor window,
across the river, off the bridge,
a flag flies over the orphanage,
America.
ABOUT THE POET
Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, Maiden Rock, is available from UnCollected Press. HERE
About the Author
