Two Poems by Colin Pope

Phone Call to Plan Abortion, as Flood

 

She says she's lost so much weight

since our breakup that she can see it,

she can feel her hips spreading out

as though her womb were a river

and the water was rising around

a lump of clay caught in its path.

She can't keep from crying. She tries,

 

knowing how hard it is for me to hear

her pain, but her levies are broke and gone:

waterlogged-teddy-bear gone,

family-photo-album gone, gone

as the christening gown blown

into a tree two towns away, gone. She says

 

in Texas, now, they make you listen

to the heartbeat. They take your ultrasound

and show it to you and make you hear

the twice-quickened rhythm against

the backdrop of yourself. She says

 

what hurts most is that it's a piece

of me she's losing, the last piece, and if

there was any part of me that wanted

to pull from the wreckage this family,

I should do something. I should do

 

something, but I can't. If you need

any help, I say, let me know. If you need

any, any help, anything at all, I'm here.

I am so artful in my evil, it takes

three of me to keep myself

 

from running back into the house

and lying down on the linoleum

to wait for her to swallow me alive.

Okay, she says. Okay. It's like searching

 

for bodies. Out there, somewhere,

the ragged corpse of goodbye

is waiting for us to find it, but instead

we stay on the line, petrified

that when we hang up it will be the last time

we'll ever hear each other breathe.

 

Suspect

 

Now I remember how the policeman

asked me where I was

at the time of your death, and I thought

how nice of him to try

to cheer me up,  joking that way

as the waves in his shoulder radio

crashed and whispered.

And then I listened to the frequency

of his lips and there wasn't a quiver,

not a single crest in the Ratline

of his face and I knew he was seriously asking

whether I had killed my girlfriend.

 

lf l had been a smarter man, a man

whose grip on the exposed wiring

of shock had not been so tight,

I would've seen it coming.

I would've inhaled and swallowed

the rotten, sulfuric taste of the entire

administrative holocaust to come,

papers exchanging hands

in distant offices, workers flitting

through the safety of their honeycomb

with their dirty feelers scraping our names,

and folders, finally, eating us whole.

"Why?" I asked instead,

 

knowing why, but wanting

to hear him say why. "We're just trying

to get all our ducks in a row," he said. "We

only want to understand."

Oh, officer, I never knew his name

but what a gift he was.

There was only so much understanding

to go around, and he wanted to drink

every drop of it, he wanted

to pound nails through the feet

of those ducks and drown them. "Home,"

 

I kept saying. Home, home, home.

He seemed to believe me,

which was funny because I knew

you were on the loose out there, fresh

as a cyclone crossing a prairie,

hovering, splitting and replicating, and

wherever I went or whatever I told him,

home had run away, dissolved, the way a word can,

the way a person can, the way facts and dates

and places end up blaming us, stupid us,

the ones who took the trouble to make them.