Life Lesson

 

Life Lesson

Big silent eyes
of the boy in the backpack
absorb the green and blue
of this fresh morning
when we hear brakes squeal.
Arp! A doggy yelp.
Me jogging, boy bouncing,
we find a white dog hit by a car,
bloody. Car gone.

We follow the dog to Hippie Hollow,
a front porch. I know this house,
the bedroom with curtains open
where once on a night walk
I stopped among others,
sidewalk passersby, watching
as a woman danced naked to a mirror.
“Somebody should tell her,” a man said.
“She knows,” a woman said.

White dog is whining, raining blood.
I knock. Door opens. A kid.
“My mom’s in bed.”
TV cartoons. Loud ones. Mayhem.
“Would you wake her?”

She comes out in a see-through nightgown
looking sleepy and annoyed.
She says her dog never goes to the road.
“Every day,” I say.
She twitches my son’s nose in the backpack
and says, “Hi there, cutie,” then winks at me
while her dog is bleeding all over the carpet.

My job is done. I turn to leave.
Her kid is crying about the blood.
She shouts, “Turn that crap off!”
From the backpack my son watches
with wide quiet eyes, whatever
one learns at the age of six months
about squalor and blood and sexy women.
Some day I hope he’ll explain.

……

From my book Random Saints
First published in Verse-Virtual thanks to Firestone Feinberg, editor
Photo by me of my son Jesse.