Sweet Home, Saturday Night by David Baker

Author:David Baker [Baker, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610754101
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

IV. Where We Live

When you get home, baby,

Write me a few of your lines.

GENERATION

imagining a son

As if the wind warns shhh in the evening willows,

two young redwings rinsing in the clear creek

abandon their joy and sleek away, sudden

as each other’s shadows in the low, light-shot leaves.

Already the shallow water settles back and burns.

Already you could be older than I was scouting

for bait from the weed-bank with my father.

Do you see? There, on the creek’s other side,

last glow under the sun-gone bank, a few minnows

cruise away and then hold, slivers, bare fingerlings,

as if signs of crawdads slick among bottom stones,

bait-sized perch urging back in a tangle of roots.

Everything knows I am here. Everything hides.

Once the silver moon hung its hook out

in lantern-light. It was only an hour from now.

He set dozens of lines along the trackless river.

He cupped a match and breathed into the black, dry wood.

He slipped hooks through the spines of tiny fish

and tossed them in, their tails sizzling away

from the lamp in my hand. If I thought we could

catch some, if I thought, tugging off boots,

rolling jeans to our knees, we could wade in

and lift the seine between us like one unfurled hand,

we would lug them sloshing in buckets down

to the river where the creek slips in and goes.

Already dusk has seeped away from the black-lit limbs.

Already an owl curses back at the sky, answering

to nothing, whining its self-starved wish.

Can you hear me? This is not about becoming a man,

but becoming. Maybe the crickets sang all night.

Maybe the shadowless bats remembered the cry of their young.

I want you to love that because you could.

Maybe we caught a fish, if it mattered, but we walked

for hours through his one, unconditional night,

and he carried me all the way back. Son,

everything knows I am here and is hiding.

I know your shadow roosts in the trees I imagine.

Let it tear free, and come hunt me down. Let me go on,

if I must, in its grip. Already I slip through the creek

just to touch these bodies, to burn them on my hooks,

just to see whose shape even now might strike,

blazing out of this fatherless, poetic dark.

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