Dovecote

(for Bevy, from abroad) I'll call you, evenings, to hear the world's busyness. The hang in your voice, the kids burbling in the background, the slop and clatter of dishes in the sink. It's easier with seven hours' span of the world between us. Like hindsight - you could tell me how I've come to be lying just after midnight here with my face pressed on the cool washcloth of a kitchen floor. And I - I'd tell you what comes - after: the dishes filed in their rack, the kids packed off to bed, there comes a moment, always, however brief, when you're alone. Oh, I know the physics, how a day exists all at once. And for that matter (if you stretch the principle enough) how a year, or all the time worth counting, girdles the universe like a child's scrawl. That's why I call, nights: to greet you with lost time, the not-vacuum of transocean phoning, a hush meaning, "Bevy, same-age cousin, middle sister of prodigious smoke-ring blowers." And you: "Oh, it's Ricky." Then, "How've you BEEN?" Meaning, "drunk, and did you ever find that happiness the world seemed offering like a haze-line that might've been far woods when we were thirteen and scab-kneed?" I tell her, "Hey" (a croak, this,) "Hey, I was thinking 'bout that place you shared one summer with your mom and one you called, alternately, Father, Uncle and Prophet. You'd commandeered an empty dovecote, I remember, some relic, or fantasy, of antebellum, where you'd go, mornings. Waiting, I think, for the different kind of hush saying the day - or he - had awoken..." "Yes?" you'll say, knowing. "But hey, what did you DO there?" Thinking smoke-rings, love, beers from The Prophet's cooler. Or - "Nothing." "Nothing." And in the long quiet after, I'll hear your youngest has tipped over her paintwater spreading a green-brown rainbow across the table, and life does - it should, though - carry on, regardless. You'll say, "Oh Ricky, but you wouldn't understand it: we waited - and, well, it was something a little like praying." "Like praying?" "Yes. Yes. We prayed to him, I can't explain it." "Of course," I'll say. "The funny thing is, I know." You, like a concession: "Yes. But we should've been killers."