Call Him Zero

It struck them both as strange: although each pond and lake

clear to the coast was locked in ice, no open water,

the imperious wind kept pushing waterfowl inland. That night

a winter moon stood high and pierced the thin clouds’ vapors

so the boy could contemplate their emptiness inside.

Relentless, the flocks flew westward. The border collie whimpered,

putting his forepaws now on one sill, now another,

as if some odd creature circled the house.

This lifetime later,

a man, he looks back on that stay at her farm, its details clear,

their meanings still vague. His grandmother called it wrong as well,

that the weather should be so frigid even in such a gale.

As a rule this kind of cold needed calm. He sees the fire,

the dazzle of sparks when she loaded a log. What seemed most amiss

was how the old woman’s house no longer felt safe that visit.

He wanted and did not want to know what the dog might know.

He tried to picture the menace outdoors. He longed to shape it

so that he might name it. And after these many miles to now,

away from the ruby glow of the metal parlor stove,

from that blue-eyed collie, from the woman he so admires and loves

recalling that night; after so much time,

he still believes

that to name a thing is to tame it, or at least to feel less bewildered.

Not Death, for instance, but The deaths of Al and Virginia, his parents.

Not the abstract legalism, Divorce, but The disappearance

of my sweet wife Sarah, run off with that California lawyer.

Not simply Alone, but I have no children. Was that the wail

of geese coming down the stovepipe? If so, it would be a marvel,

but he knew it wasn’t. The caterwaul from the barn was alarming,

and more than it might have been had Grandma herself not startled—

after which she put on her late large husband’s threaded farming

coveralls outside her housedress, which rode up and made

a lumpy sash. She stepped out under cloud and bird.

He would not follow. Rather, he stood

indoors to wait

until she came stomping her boots through puddled barnyard holes

like a child herself, kicking ice shards to scuttle along

like beads from a broken bracelet. No matter. The world had gone wrong,

violent and void at once. She said, The mare has foaled.

On tiptoe, she read the mercury out the kitchen window,

then told her shivering grandson, We’ll call the new colt Zero.

Source: No Doubt the Nameless (Four Way Books, 2016)