Stories of Lost Children
Excerpts from "New Fields and Other Stones"
by Saul Bennett, Author of "New Fields and Other Stones", Woodstock, New York
THE COMMUTER As one killed my child
I know brain
aneurysms liquidate at 24.
But on my
train this evening stands this woman
from our town, her
airless face pummeled paper sack. "Aneurysm
survivor. Rare! Rare! A good
70, don’t she look? Ya know, she's
50?" whispers he
who points her out with a discoverer's
pride two months after
my baby died, babbling all I hated to hear
how this creature
with the lucky streak lived. Now wanting terribly
to resent her every tick
tock, I find I am unable. On
my insides instead
I give her a kiss.
RESUSCITATION
Whenever without warning
her name preceding
the last of another appears below before me
in a black daylily field
of print I press opposing thumbs hard and flat applying
utmost pressure against
the page obliterating all in the rigid row save
Sara thus restoring to my eye's
heart my daughter's beat
MEASUREMENTS
With my pocket magnifier,
just a complaisant slip
like a flattened tortoise head
lacking color, from its narrow soft plastic
navy case, a piddling tool
that now a half-year "afterward"
has discovered--what luck!— permanent lodgings
in the shabby interior
of my wallet, I explore
impulsively again my darling daughter's
face, her eyes in Sara's
last earth-shot at 24
5 months 8 days; Sara, her mother, sister,
I; we, looking pleased
in quickfreeze-pose
seconds before our Taps. "solongHonloveyoucall"
12 days before suddenly
without warning
in perfect health our first- born is struck. This 1
by 3 silly promo freebie
across my universe
trained, unrehearsed down, up, floating
upon its subject, she
my successor, muted, is
God's true instrument.
BAGGED
Cerebral palsy came today to take
our daughter's clothes. Two years it took to call
then go below alone one last night to rouse
the condemned cartons, heavy each a soul,
and bid them join the prostrate bags my wife
had filled by day. I helped the driver load
the sprawling sacks into the bursting back-
side of the seething August truck. Before
I knew I threw one unencumbered by
whose flesh in flight then smothered my contempt.
RESERVATION AT "21"
I met the Messiah today
For lunch. Before me
She arrived. When
She rose we kissed then sat An hour or more
In a haze of mauve
Low ceiling room resembling
"21" before. Her fluffy-shoulders lilac dress I recognized.
Her auburn waves dove about the same. Though
She wore no pearls at first I came to see
Her eighteenth birthday Stand appear. At length
She raised my hand to view
Her ring, anointing with a fingertip
Its onyx face now three years past Her date. We talked of family first, of course;
Her friends. At dessert
She said it wise were
She to leave before me. Would we Dine again, I asked
And prayed, distracted just
A fraction by the check. When I looked up
The staff was there.
NOTHING
In the shack we share
in the woods near the house
my daughter and I convene. She died four years ago,
almost, suddenly, 24, leaving us,
younger brother, sister. Our children came
less than two years apart. We moved, my wife and I,
last year, left the destiny.
The children are in the city.
I do a little consulting
from the house and make
poems in the shack behind. A good number of the poems are about her,
us, sometimes the five of us.
God doesn't tap my shoulder. The place has nothing in it,
nothing: stone floor,
cracked;
raw walls;
eaten away foot
wide plank ledge-my desk. I stand.
Moving newspaper soft black copy pencils
without erasers from my old days
I compose, revise in fine point fountain pen
green, harvest,
bury, reluctantly, overripe
darlings, dreaming
out the unwashed shallow window
that won't open. Around,
the box musn't be much
more than six feet. There
we converse in her element. There I feel nothing
comes between us.
nothing
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