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sensational silence

by Gabriel Ricard

Three or four times the waltz comes up
before he finally rises.
The old man looks at the ground
and mouths the words the two of them put to it
late last year.

It was at the point where she wasn’t quite up
for getting out of bed anymore. An hour later
she slipped out the door to find Houdini and Marlene Dietrich.

He didn’t believe in reincarnation.
She did and told him to keep an eye on Broadway
for the next young thing who could dance
as though it was never the shoes to begin with.

That damn waltz was nameless. They first heard it on the radio
in the late-50’s and never got around to giving it a name
no one else would have understood or cared much to know.

He checks the chamber once again
and once again finds all six bullets ready
for a pulp magazine argument with a voice
so steady it can swindle the rain into turning around
and going right back to where it came from.

There were other tunes at different times,
but that was the one she liked the most,
so they put aside in order to pay their taxes,
hate the racist their daughter married
and outlive a great many people who took
much better care of themselves.

Walking towards the emergency room entrance
he looks for some sign of life in the plastic palm trees
that outnumber cars in the lot or patients
on the sixth floor and final floor.

He gets about half of what would be a good song title
as he walks in through the door and smiles
with that pistol in his do-or-die right hand.

The left hand is prone to fear
and tick-tock fits of flesh and bone nerves.

The twenty-year-old sequential art major doesn’t notice him.

He’s got two gorgeous, gently unhinged beauties on his left
and another on his right.

One of them is a Nazi with a record and an inferiority complex.
Another thinks those black widow types didn’t go far enough.
The third has a chance of being saved if the price tag is sincere.

He has no idea about any of that.
He grins, smokes vanilla cigarettes and plans to cheat death
by devoting an entire year to birthdays. The rest of eternity
will be devoted to shrugging like a child prodigy
whenever someone is floored at his ability to drink a bottle of vodka
and still cook a six-course meal while saving the best for last.

His parents haven’t seen him
since he dropped out of middle school to join
the traveling puppet show that left him for dead in Kill Devil Hills.

Then there’s that first wife and three kids
who pray he never comes crawling back.

The girls are ignorant of all these costly things.
They can barely march to the car in unison
for three completely different reasons.

When the driver sees them coming
he sighs and continues on with reading the paper.

His great-uncle used to think of better headlines
in his sleep.

04/16/2011

Posted on 04/16/2011
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard

Member Comments on this Poem
Posted by Charlie Morgan on 04/16/11 at 10:52 PM

...i'd go hide, seems he's on the prowl.

Posted by Kristina Woodhill on 04/21/11 at 03:56 AM

I really like those first four stanzas.

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