First Summer After Divorce in an Apartment without Air Conditioning

Selections from:
FIRST SUMMER AFTER DIVORCE IN AN APARTMENT WITHOUT AIR CONDITIONING"

The heat is not so much as cold
which is a war horse.

Heat is more of a ghost, somewhat dis-
oriented, with crumbs on his chin.
Second cousin Sixkiller
when he sat in the old kitchen and
talked,
choking suddenly,
somehow marked with an x like the barn door.
He turned over his plate when we jumped
at him.

Heat is a distant relative
choking
on venison and squaw bread.
We beat him on the back
but he rode into the space behind his eyes
like the bus
upstate
from Broken Bow.

Heat pushes in while cold drives away.

Last winter
deciding to divorce
I thought I'd never be warm again.
We opened the pasture gate
and the war horse
trampled
the field of daisies until it became a
constellation.

The flowers have sharp teeth and throats
like black holes.
None of us know where we are going.

As I lie in the heat,
I think of Sixkiller,
buried so wolves can't get to him,
bear teeth around his neck, prayer-sticks
like fenceposts
in the ground.

Heat pushes inward with the weight of barns,
and in some inverse way
made the house bigger,
while cold let me know how small it was.

Relatives confused about divorce
interrupt like bugs in the field,
talk among themselves.

But in the daisy field we are less sure of
what we doing.
Less certain of the other side.
Yet we trample the flower-eaters of our space
in dreams.

The season of the war horse is over
until the equinox.

In this slight suffocation, which heat is,
the relatives carry tradition
while we expanded
to dark sky
brushing crumbs of squaw bread from a ghost.

I lie in wet nightclothes above the field
of space.
Bear constellation sleep-walks the
Oklahoma summer.
Forgetting the dingy bus station that was
between us, we separate now as cold,
but these hot nights
pushed together again by thought.

Heat doesn't bother me as much as cold:
a ghost compared
to the corporeal war horse.

We circle the stale smell of wallpaper
in the old kitchen
where Sixkiller haunts the small frame of
our orb
and we are humbled at the sight of it.


Diane Glancy

From Brown Wolf Leaves the Res and Other Poems (1984). Used with permission of the author.