To Rotate.
Not that you didn't care, but that you couldn't see that you did, couldn't even feel it in your fingers at first, clamped as you were by everything that had made you angry-- that was the problem. It was a fine day to be loosened by stains tho, even if miserable about the ticket & tow. It was a fine day to buzz. To rotate through a patois. To unfold in the flux of a despicable mobile home made to do double-wide duty as an office. At the tow company car lot the office heater did what it could--it floated the sour sauce from the half-eaten bowl of canned spaghetti & mixed it with the aerated fug that hung about an elderly German Shepherd, the balls dangling between his spindly legs like black pudding stones set permanently asway-- the dog's left hind leg nicked by a tow truck on some ancient, forgettable day-- his pelvic zone off-kilter, the leg kinked by a limp. "I didn't hit him, he walked in front of me," snorts the billing clerk and Chancellor of the Exchequer, a fathead. And to stroke such a dog's face at such a moment is to indemnify the kindness in you, no matter how small-- your kindness reveals itself as the wheelchair ideogram stenciled onto asphalt to save the parking space reveals itself when ice melts--slowly.
DAVID RIVARD is the author of five books of poetry, including Otherwise Elsewhere, Sugartown, and Wise Poison, winner of the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Among his recent awards is a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria in 2012.
photograph by Jennifer Flescher
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| Title Annotation: | twelve poems |
|---|---|
| Author: | Rivard, David |
| Publication: | The American Poetry Review |
| Article Type: | Poem |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2013 |
| Words: | 338 |
| Previous Article: | Arriving from a Destination. |
| Next Article: | Rye Whiskey, Rye Whiskey. |
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