for Theresa Halbach
A tunnel, a gun in his hand: the dream he had
of escaping. Maybe this carries him
away from the salvage yard,
to keep a woman here, to feel
her resistance. It pinches a nerve. It proves
he’s alive. I’ve lived here in quiet cowardice
myself for years, my secrets like brushfires
in the cluster of adolescent trees, where I could have
prayed or taken a lover.
But the barns are full of dead cars and firewood
piled neatly. This is the match he lit to burn her
camera, her phone. As if this would blind her, erase
her voice like a message on his machine. She fought him,
and maybe despised him a little, before he’d done
anything to her. Sometimes I’d descend
into the hollow tunnel of our roofless silo, to see
the sky, a way out. What was that swelled
feeling I had, looking through
the top of the silo like a cement telescope? The giant blue
eye looked back at me, and I knew I could make
so much more of myself. She looked
at him, and she smiled and tried to be kind,
stepping around the car parts eroding into his yard,
her eye on him: open, an escape
he made for a few hasty minutes.
In her car, he held her down. He made her quiet.
He emerged bloodied, crossing the charred
patch of earth, a secret fire spreading.
And for a moment in the struggle, he was
her: the jerk and spasm and flicker
of a life worth fighting for. She made him wish
he was more. And he burned
the evidence.
Appeared in Passages North in 2006.