M.A. Schaffner

RATS

Once they may have been a minor species
we viewed perhaps as incidental food,
rooted from the occasional burrow
by women searching for tubers or grubs.
Aha! they'd say, holding their find by the tail
while it squirmed like a furry toad and flashed
radiant, pin-prick eyes. Then they'd dash its brains
against a tree, and lay it in a special basket.
When the men returned meatless from the hunt,
questioning their dreams and the shaman's prayers,
the women would laugh and show their harvest,
sometimes a dozen of the beasts: snake-tailed,
short-eared, bloody and plump to bloating. Meat.

Millennia passed as the glaciers withdrew.
On the sunswept prairies, burrows ran deep
in blind gropings for coolness and moisture.
We fled the brazen plains, thickened rivers;
priests arose among those who found the gods
in seasonal processions through the sky,
and knew which star's arrival meant, to plant.
And what's our history together after that—
subject, killer, vector, each in turn?

We never hunt them anymore for food;
still, one morning as I puttered through my yard
with a fork for turning compost into soil,
I saw one huddled darkly in the flowers
and knew it was the one that, late at night,
had looted the bird seed in the pantry,
shit in the kitchen, spooked the dogs awake,
and had in mind my ultimate eviction.
I speared it where it sat. I felt the tine
shatter ribs and slice its guts clean through.
It squealed and turned, and bit the fork so hard
I felt its pain's vibrations in my hands,
my tightening grip. It bit and squealed again,
like Abel, I imagined, struck at prayer.

PARADISE

There's so much crap about love. It never lasts.
At best it's a well-meant preacher's lie,
but more a myth for friends and family, passed

from cynic to dupe, to groom and bride;
as bitter as champagne with wedding cake;
as ephemeral as the gardener's sigh

when she discovers on her morning walk
the roses dying by the rusted gate.
Love's as lovely as an alarm clock.

Because none of your dreams are ever unshaved,
or smell or spend money. None of them buds
bad habits from the branch of no escape.

So you know it can't last, and you must
tolerate that knowledge like a weed
too stubborn and ugly to stay cut.

You'll learn to dampen down your dreams,
ignore old farts who knew, but then forgot,
that virtue makes its living from defeat,

and the grubs in the garden live from the rot
of last year's blooms. But then comes the surprise.
Not at loss, but that, some evening dining out,

or morning getting up, or even as your eyes
blur from the damn TV, you feel something churn
in the light, the tone of voice, the hour. You rise,

and find the year's first feathered curl of fern,
or spike-tipped bulb. Of course it won't last.
But like petals from mud, it can return.

THE TENNESSEE TEENAGE VAMPIRE KILLERS

A kid got an interview on HBO
by bludgeoning his girlfriend's parents
with a crowbar. He'd seen the movie Crow,
but you'd only call it an influence,

not a cause. He got a rush from killing;
his little gang would slice themselves and suck
each others' blood, but it wasn't as thrilling
as the ultimate act. "What the fuck,"

he said he said, smashing her father's face,
thinking of death as a positive act
as well as what you'd call a better place,
where every boy and girl can dress in black.

I must say I enjoyed this on TV;
the writers didn't waste my time with why
good vampires went bad, or what children see
in making it a sacrament to die.

Call it "ambience," I guess, the foul air
that lingers on a trailer park or mall,
or wealthy streets—the there that isn't there,
the anchormen who otherwise won't call.

Top of Page