At night, an infant, I’d crawl
downstairs to perform casual
acts of violence, the radio,
phonograph, and TV particular
targets of my ire. To retaliate,
my father at bedtime affixed
chicken wire atop my crib.
Those were innocent if benighted times.
Pregnant mothers smoked, car seats weren’t
invented yet, no one childproofed their home.
When five years old, caught between gangs of
rock-throwing boys, my head got split open.
My parents rushed me bleeding and screaming
to the emergency room. Decades later I still bear
a crescent-moon scar like an incipient third eye.
Today, on TV, again terrible news. I switch it
off and sit in darkness while a drone hovers
outside my window. Observing me, it buzzes,
squeaks, butts against the glass.
The world is never safe. In the bathroom mirror,
I touch my scar willing that eye to open.
eulogy
My father had good days and bad but stayed
upbeat until the end, confident his doctors
would save him. He survived cancer twice,
in his 40s and 60s, and a motorcycle accident
at 72, which left him partly paralyzed.
But he learned to walk again—another near
miracle—and at age 76, diagnosed with emphysema,
finally quit cigarettes: It was easy, my father
bragged, I could have quit years ago.
And for years he hid his dementia, clever man,
until one day opening his car door in speeding traffic.
Once near the end I visited my parents in their
RV park in Florida. My father, a retired electrician,
earned extra money working odd jobs for neighbors.
He showed me a new swimming pool with
arcing neon lamps and submersible lights
and pointed to the very last fixture he installed
before hand, eye, and memory finally gave out.
I imagine decades later the swimming pool still
unfinished, the half-lights aglow in memoriam. I rarely
visit Florida anymore or the small Jewish cemetery
where my parents lie, grass and scrub land wedged
between an industrial park and busy interstate highway.
A mother lifts her boy
above the seawall
the nearby esplanade crowded
so many have come to see
the recent wreck.
Its keel crushed and timbers twisted
like palsied fingers
the boat lists
as the tide shifts and shears.
The boy imagines a giant hermit crab
taking up residence there
not unlike the creature in the sci-fi film
he and his father saw when last they visited.
Claws and antennae retracting
amid splintered ribs and rotting sails.
“Third Eye” first appeared in Gargoyle Online #8 as “Chicken Wire”; “Eulogy in Gargoyle Online #6 as “Anamnesis”; and “Sci-Fi” in Gargoyle #59. Many thanks to long-time editor, publisher, and friend Richard Peabody.
Art: from Collection of Eye Miniatures courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
