Jody's Notes
Intimacy has its risks. The poem exhibits an extreme case, of course, but it's an extreme case that happens. And you wonder, I imagine, how you could have missed the signs. It's only afterwards that you're able to put it together, that everything can be made to make sense (if you try to make sense of everything at that point--not everyone does). The appeal, the almost supernatural appeal--of the detective genre--is that the detective, because of some fictional quirk of personality, is able to do this kind of thing ahead of time. No one else has this capacity, of course, no one real, I mean.
The poem was republished in my collection The Lust for Blueprints in 2001.
Dumb as a nail, I look out the window,
watching the dead snow gather in piles.
They point flashlights into his living-room
floor; the broken parquet slumps around
a vulnerable hole, the dark a shadow
blanketing its kill. “Paydirt,”
one says. I see an arm
in a plastic bag, other bags
beneath it.
They take me out of the building. One
holds my hands, a small gift of flesh,
and tells me I’m safe. I gaze at his badge
and like a lamp it fills with light.
There is a box in my future now
and I’ll be there
if I ever shut my eyes again.
© 1998, 2001 Jody Azzouni