Issue 3 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

Where she had perhaps planted the thought of the
chase in slow motion at the funeral. When she had
felt them leaning toward her, when she reached for the
shovel. Before they started moving toward her in on
her between her & her mother's grave. Cutting her off
from her mother's grave. When they had seemed to be
moving all at once, in a body, like a swarm of bees.
But these were peaceful honest small-town folk.
Law-abiding citizens, who left their doors unlocked
when they went shopping. Or to the cemetery, to funeralize
somebody, as they called it. Even at night they
left their doors unlocked. It was all her morbid imagination:
Martin would tell her: the persecution complex
she'd been cultivating, as a refuge from responsibility.
From boredom.
But I hear them! she said half loud. Belligerently.
They're hammering all around the house. At the back
door. Outside the living room window—
She did not only hear them. She could see them:
two red-freckled hands, driving long shiny nails into a
cross that was beginning to bar her living room window.
Martin wasn't always right now, just because he
had become a psychiatrist . . .
Above the sofa, her father's impasto face was
breaking into a wide purple smile.
70
TERESE SVOBODA
Arbor Day
You planted trees three times.
For less view, you said, and to break up
the sky. Mornings you hauled them plenty
of water and spoke to each in soft tones.
Prairie dogs, you prefer to think,
ate back the roots; the wind wasn't that bad.
Of course, backing over two with a pickup
didn't help much. But others had whole groves
that took to the sand like sagebrush. The dogs
are out now, hesitant and abrupt, the color
of earth against the sky. Hundreds appear,
bobbing up from their holes. All their eyes
seem to see you. It is as if all at once
the land takes them back again, leaving
the horizon empty, but for the lightning,
branching and blooming.
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