Richard Krawiec

The Dark Visits

Does a lone vulture perched atop

my wellhouse imply everything

is not well? Even scavengers thirst,

so it may be seeking an opportunity to slake

the dry grating in its parched throat, or soothe

sour flesh past its gullet.  Perhaps a servant

to Shinigami, angles its sharp beak to pull

light down to the death spirits who glide

the river coursing the afterworld below,

draining desire from life.

Carcass Seeker or Totem? Peace Angel or

Death Eater? Goddess, Purifier of Life, Omen?

Vulture soars through cultures, through dawn skies, seeking

putrescence, seeking others to invite.  Once I spied fifty feathered

undertakers enbranched in rows like spectators in an amphitheater, 

bald heads gleaming sunburnt red;  two at a time, they hopped down

to gorge in the ark of deer carcass, gore their beaks into the hull

of  stomach. Each one tore a plug of organ, snake of intestine,

raised these treasures up to glisten in the light, bit by bit

removing the dead.

Swarms of feeding finch and chickadees

crack sunflower kernels, sunrise communion, against

the lucid edge of the feeder, oblivious to my rough passage

towards morning, or the carnivore talon-grasping along tender

shingles above the underground spring.  Vulture tilts a scarlet dawn

towards my window, like the man who stumbled out of a Chinatown

doorway when I was five, completed the fortune in my hand– you will meet

your fate outdoors –by whispering an index finger barrel into my face.

I have never known how to read my life.  It ends

where it begins; same words, same questions.

What is coming? Is it for me?

*

The Organ Harvesters

after the third transfusion

leaked out the sieves

of her son’s wounds

his blood washed

free of the coagulants 

needed to thicken and staunch,

the organ harvesters

swarmed the mother

demanding the right to save

someone else

                       they didn’t know

how much damage her son’s

brain sustained in the car crash

felt no pity for his body

dripping like a dollar store

sponge, he had signed papers

awarding parts of himself

to strangers and they had arrived

intent on reaping what the mother

had sown, gleaning

from a field never again to be

turned over, planted, 

allowed to ripen.

after his son’s death, sitting in the parking lot outside the post office

he stares across the access road.

yellow machines beaked with shark-

toothed buckets tear the woods to terra-

cotta rubble.  snapping on the radio

to talk show blather,  he hunches over

one more New York Times crossword,

more intent than the rain splattering

his windows to grease.  what words

could he find, must he find, how many

squares fill in before he can fool himself

that the confluence of letters will stop

the oil truck from ripping through his son’s

Toyota?  of course it is fantasy, this belief

time can be reversed if only he waits

long enough, face turned away, a letter might

emerge in the silver lozenge of a mailbox nesting

in the shining grid of other small doors, closed yet

hopeful.  perhaps,  a postmark announcing his boy

transits in Rio or Djakarta; he is not the 23-year-old

meat puppet on a guard rail

they were both travelers in the realm of superstition,

so it is like holding his son’s hand to hunch over newsprint,

listen for a sudden cryptic alert, seek coded messages – it is

as comfortable as tucking the boy into his childhood bed

it is the only way you can even attempt to outwit downfall

*

Famine Roads*

Night pushes away the day.

Even still, they continue

to angle their shovels

into the mucky sod. Sparks

flare when their blades strike

granite.  Their chins hang down,

mouths  fallen open as if to filter

life from air. In the congregation

of dark, the stars go unnoticed.

So the English dealt with famine,

forcing bodies into ketosis, ravening

their own cells; hair and nails fragile,

organs full of toxins, hearts shrunken

to faulty pumps;  like love twisted

from joy to doubt, feeding on itself.

And so, too, my dear, we scrape forward,

lift our spades, plunge exhausted

towards a ground we can only hope

to judder against, just as we ask

the brittle bones of our feet, gauzed

in cracked skin, to deliver us,

to finish this road, pray it doesn’t

go nowhere.

*During the Potato Famine the British, under the 1847 Labour Rate Act, would force starving Irish peasants to build roads that legally could not go anywhere.  

*

Found

At  Monday’s sunset

she parked

her practical Toyota 

neatly by the locked gate,

removed her shoes,

lined them perfectly

together on the dock

beside the pill bottle

then breathed beneath

the heat-thickened water

of Falls Lake.

On Tuesday

I rushed to her house

to find a dazed husband

taping TV shows, a son

smashing vases, guitars,

glass shards speckled

the living room.

Old memories surfaced;

the noose

around Charlie’s neck;

the shotgun

in Michael’s mouth.

That Sunday

my friend’s daughter

in the carefree thrall

of twenty-two

drove 90 miles per hour

into history.  I saw again

one night’s empty highway

the wailing, broken boys,

my friends, their car sliced

in two by the Exit sign,

steam and fluids

hissing, popping.

None of this happened

to me, yet this shroud bows

down my shoulders, folds

my face into itself.

Even my smiling son

cannot draw me back

with his happy prattle.

Frost was wrong.

The choice is not one

of divergent paths.

The roads not traveled

all threaten bracken ponds,

heat-slick roads,

the possibility

of blood and darkness

waiting to be seized.

© Richard Krawiec

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