Two
poems from Peter Bethanis's The Man Who Ran Out of Metaphors
followed
by a note on the author
American
Future
In
1963 the morning probably seemed harmless enough
for my parents to sign on the dotted line
as the insurance man talked to them for over an hour
around a coffee table about our future.
"This roof wasn't designed to withstand meteors,"
he told my father, who back then had a brush haircut
that made his ears stick out, his moods
still full of passion, willing to listen,
my mother with her beehive hairdo,
smiling back at him, all three of them
wanting so much to make the fine print
of the world work. They laughed and smoked,
and after they led the man politely to the door,
my
parents danced in the afternoon light,
the phonograph playing Frank Sinatra,
the green Buick's payments up to date,
five hundred dollars safely in the bank –
later that evening, his infallible common sense
ready to protect us from a burst pipe or dry rot,
my father waded up to his ankles in water,
a V of sweat on the back of his shirt.
Something loomed deeper than any basement
on our block, larger than he was,
an uncertainty he could not admit was unsolvable
with a monkey wrench or a handshake
and a little money down.
The
Deer in the Barns
In
autumn, the men hang deer
upside down from the barn rafters.
Run their knives the whole length
of the belly – then barrel-hoop their arms
and yank out the guts like a sack of potatoes.
Their eyes tear from the smell
and blood drips down onto newspapers.
Laughing, drinking, talking
late into the night, they gather around the animal,
its eyes blank as bullets, its tongue
a pink glove in its mouth,
its lip curled as if to speak.
One
of the sons, rubbing the soft curve
of the deer's ear, asks questions
about death, and once again,
they all huddle about the moonlit dark
with the same sacred lies,
doomed creatures themselves, afraid to flinch.
©
Peter Bethanis was born in 1964 and grew up
in rural Maine. He took a BA in English from the University
of Maine at Farmington and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst. His poems and essays have appeared in over fifty
literary journals, including Poetry, Lullwater Review,
and Tar River Poetry. He won the Eve of St. Agnes Poetry
Prize in 1995, and has been a finalist in the National Poetry
Series. He currently resides in Indianapolis and is on the writing
faculty at Ball State University.
"American
Future" first appeared in Poetry, and "The
Deer in the Barns" first appeared in Aethlon, and
was selected by James Dickey as winner of the Eve of St Agnes
Poetry Award, 1995.
