The sound downstairs, The man with the metal detector & Gold
by Daniel Hales
[ poetry - august 09 ]
The sound downstairs
The baseball bat under the bed
has rolled to where I can't reach.
It was probably
nothing, small
nothing bumping littler nothing,
except you heard it, too.
So I'm lying naked
on the hardwood floor, breathing
hard, arm fleeced to the shoulder
in the vast dust preserve.
A sound a short distance
from inaudible:
a door flexing its frame,
a quarter turned knob,
a storm pane inching.
A sound that knows
our hiding places
and passwords,
my exact threshold for pain,
even if there was
no sound.
The man with the metal detector
He seems to have found
the expression of a pianist's
page-turner, except as long
as I've watched today he
has yet to turn the page.
You've seen him pace a beach,
a ball field, any expanse where
something may have been left.
A coulter rolling in reverse,
hoping to harvest what was
planted by chance. Steering
slowly with his ears,
he listens close for what I only
now realize I have lost, for
what has grown silent for me
to become his sudden music.
Gold
The officer will ask you a question
and there will be something
in the way he says the phrase back there.
This officer is likely a kind and gentle man.
He wears a gold badge and his uniform
appears clean and ironed.
But even good people have bad days.
He may have a soundproofed
cell in the basement of his home,
a handcuff and scalpel collection.
Many young women have words, all in CAPS
stitched into the ass of their sweatpants.
The steeple's paint is cracked, peeling.
Sorry officer, I didn't see the sign,
may not be enough.
Try to count how many geese
are in the frayed V flying over. Twenty,
twenty-one counting the straggler?
