The Man from the Colonies
It’s always the Roman Empire in outer space,
where men in gold lamé togas are oppressing the natives
of some planet on the outer rim. On one of those planets
it’s 1988, and I am fourteen years old and it’s snowing
like Hell. My parents have bought my big sister
an old car for Christmas and hidden it behind the barn.
I’ve got to start it each morning in the corpse-black
cold, or the engine will fall forever into the silence
around us. I sit behind the wheel, blowing warm moisture
from my lungs like smoke from my father’s Kools
while I let the engine ramble on about something
to do with clanking and grinding, the radio
tuned to a college station out of Dallas. I’m imagining
what would happen if I yanked the column stick
down and rolled, wind sauntering in through
the windows warmer and warmer as I drift further
south, everything I know balled and frozen into an iceberg
drifting away behind me. And then I’m nearly forty.
When I crawl out my window onto the roof
of the new house on this planet on the edge
of a vast and lecherous empire, I can see the barn
behind the house where I grew up. All the dogs
in town begin to bark, asking me why
I never went anywhere, and I see versions
of my childhood friends walking up and down the sidewalk.
We are like a grassy field worn thin with the passing
of cattle. Some evenings on this far-flung planet I drive
my two daughters out to the house where I grew up
and sit in the minivan with the engine idling. At night
I sleep beside the wife of my youth, her breathing
settling over everything like that snow from long ago.
That’s when I know I want to die on this other earth
and will ask her to bury me in its hard, metallic dirt,
so that the seeds of my bones don’t sprout too quickly
and so that the folks in Heaven will know which way
to watch for me to come walking.
***
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Photo by Carol Von Canon /Flickr
