Patti’s Dad

Our neighbor next-door,

big blond-headed guy whose silence scared me.

He worked out of town and when he was home

did little but lie prone on their sofa and read.

Sort of lumbered in place. Never said boo.

We were supposed to stay out of his way.

--As with my own dad when he'd just gotten in

from work, we weren't supposed to talk to him.

He had to unwind.

It was like Patti's dad

was always just getting home.

One time he brought us two hulking, empty green drums

we'd fill with surging water from a hose,

and then sort of stand there inside of them.

Odd, but we did cool off.

And then he started getting rich.

Compared to us, anyway.

He and his brother were well into business

in Bakersfield, something to do with mixtures of chemicals,

and the big chemical plant in Ventura.

He still lounged around on his sofa, still read his books,

drifting, it seemed, ever deeper away,

just richer and richer.

Carted home funny sackloads

of nothing but Mars Bars for his kids,

had a darkroom installed for his wife,

then learned how to fly and bought himself a plane

to wing his family back to Texas

where he'd come from.

And I also recall, one afternoon, out of nowhere,

he butchered one of their rabbits,

skinned the thing right there on the curb

at the edge of his lawn and a lot of ogling kids.

I and my brother and sisters

once owned a single pet rabbit,

two or three hamsters, several turtles,

five dogs and a horse,

but I'd never yet seen anything dead.

Well, I saw this thing’s dead head flop

as he scraped and slipped the fur off like a wrapper.

It was all raw, pink-and-blue translucence,

so out of whack

with our living rooms, stationwagons, mothers and shrubs.

The man's blind nerve,

or oblivion!

The last I heard, his life had gone kind of rotten.

Patti grew up to go to jail, his wife's been ill,

and he and his brother and this and that,

so their business went to shit.

But a long time ago, he built us a home in a tree,

in the field out apart from all the houses.

We'd scramble up branches into miles of air,

light and a hole in the sky

(till the warden, that is, whom we never believed,

simply stole the whole contraption,

and red ants swarmed over.)

Weird thing too, he was always changing names--

McGuiness to King, William to Will,

to Bill and back to Will again--

but never said much of anything to anyone.