Rimbaud’s Father
BY CHARLIE CLARK
Once, in Algeria, wild dogs
ate the wooden fore-wheel
of a woman’s pushcart
while he and his fellow
infantrymen looked on,
a half-dozen of them
having commandeered her
porch for napping. Some
things are inevitable. How
he tried to help her clean
the pulp up after, how
something in the slobber,
the thickness of it coating
the wood, slowed him.
Each scrap white as chicken
meat after the cleaver
and the peeling and the rinsing
in cold water. He knew
men who bragged about
eating their lieutenant’s
thighs after weeks trapped
in cold mountains. He knew
it was mostly lies, and that
it would be their only legacy.
He knew to call the dogs
charms sent to assure him
he would survive this
and that he was not destined
for greater things. So when
one dog came back, mottled,
prancing, sharp cowlick
of its jaw angled high
to keep the rough strip
of wheel it mouthed from
dragging, one of the soldiers
shot it. It bled out howling
and they let it. Soon after,
another soldier torched
the woman’s house. He cut
for himself a swatch of her
curtain. No secret to see
in the elegant little turnstiles
of its embroidery. History
is dainty. Even panic can
seem quaint there. He knows
what the future has
no use for; he’s no different
than the acres of his father’s
failing orchards, his hours
itching the harvest in,
the bland-to-bitter paste
they made of all its ripeless figs.
