Holly Pettit


Road

I.
The web-site photo of 1908 Arlington is so right
that through the gloom of ninety years
faded ink, browned paper, and now
glowering pixels, sunshine on weeds
is still breathless and true as hot air in your lungs.
This mud road to Dallas is so deep
a man sits on the edge of it, lets his legs hang
swinging down in the ruts; a small boy
stands on the bank beside him. The frame Victorian
behind the two is awash in tall grass
that glints and wilts in the sun while shade
from the eves and in the dark window suggests
some dark interior clarity. Cicadas reel
as the world dives, the human brain,
(heat-struck and fainting), spins
to the lowest, coolest, root cellar level.

II.
In bed last night I was hot, still wearing
the sweatshirt from all day long. You
were asleep, unbothered
by how the bed sags, how the highway noise
washes over the town always at the floor
of consciousness. How many fat wives
have stayed awake thus, undecided
whether to love the weight
of an overthrown arm, or to toss it
off. The heat of close bodies! Yet
there I was, watching
with eyes closed, thinking how deep we
are sunk in history with Hemingway and the good-
wives of Amsterdam, the Empires of Africa ñ
the future weighing down on us
as we strain to support it like a child who
enlists our shoulders
to scale a wall then refuses
to describe what he sees
on the other side.

III.
The orphaned son of orphans, neither Big Daddy
nor his brothers spent one day in school, so when
his brother Martin took a horse and rode west
in 1905, there were no letters coming back,
and no one to read them. In 1955, after Mom
and Dad married in L.A. they drove the Buick
home to Alabama and brought Big Daddy back
as far as Texas. I can see him
in the front seat, trying to talk to my skinny
city daddy, and then later in the back
of that fish-tailed car, an arm
thrown over the back of the seat, him sizing up
countryside with those blue, horse-auction eyes, hoping
to find his brother, or even
some version of a brother
fifty years hence.

Holly Pettit was born on a SAC base in Washington state and raised on Route 10 between Florida and California. She served as a Russian Linguist for the U.S. Army in Germany, graduated Harvard Divinity School, and was a Crisis Counselor in Boston. She lives in Littleton, Massachusetts. Her short stories and poems have appeared in various periodicals such as Crania, Gravity, and 2River Poetry Her poem "Irkutsk" won first prize in the 1st Annual Poetry competition of the e-zine Tapestry. You can contact her at hpettit@ma.ultranet.com.