What Will I Tell Our Son?

You're lying here on the dining room table.
So silent. The stillness of eternity is in you
and on you, like an overcoat in the wrong
season.

What will I tell our son?

I fear you in this state of terminality,
in this bloodlessness, in this blanket of dust
that you came home wearing, along with
a hole in your chest, and vacant eyes
my sister mercifully closed before
I saw you here.

What will I tell our son?

I have my obligation. I must make you
ready to meet the earth; your bride of tomorrow
with her cool damp kiss. How can I do this,
when you are my husband of all these years?
You are my husband. Now, my sister's sure hand
removes your shoe, and I see the place I darned
at the toe of your sock, I wonder if it ever felt
uncomfortable. You never said so.

What will I tell our son?

I hear my sister's voice from across a canyon
calling me to help with your trousers, and I see your
long white feet are bare and innocent, and now my
sister will look at you with distanced eyes carrying
no desire for the body I so love, the skin I know so well.

What will I tell our son?

You have a scar I didn't know you had. Yet I loved you,
and I laid with you for twenty-four years, and kissed each pore
of your skin a hundred times over, but never once in the light of
the sun filled meadow. Now I wash your face, and see the lines
the years put there after the rains failed, and the crops failed,
and our hopes failed, and you went to the law and carried it
on your shoulders like a log too heavy for any man to lift,
until it pressed you into the ground with one sharp report
heard by everyone but me.

What will I tell our son?

You lie here before me. I trim your hair. I am
acquainted with your cool flesh now. It no longer
terrifies me. I raise your arm to close the shirtsleeve
at your wrist, and look at your wedding ring grown loose
on your finger, as has my own, the years having
consumed us in miniscule quantities
like a penance we paid without noticing it.

What will I tell our son?

The moon shines through the window with it's
terrible light; the lamps, empty of oil,
have burnt out and left their smoky scent in the air.

Our friends have gone, my sister has gone, and
you are gone. I kiss your absent face. I keen
with insane grief, and without a sound.
I see my eyes in the mirror across the room
looking back at me - so pallid in my black dress,
in my frozen silence on this endless deep night.

I will never be the same again.

What will I tell our son, when he comes home
from the long horrifying war, home from
those fields of death?

You were always the one to answer these questions
for me. You were always the one.

What will I tell our son?


A. Murray
July 17, 2003

This poem, unlike most of my poetry, is fictional. It is based remotely on a scene from the film, "Places in the Heart", and by the essence of both, "The Edge of the Crazies" by Jamie Harrison, and "Cowboy Poetry" by Richard Sellers.