David A. Bart - poems
  • Intro
  • Home
  • Kingdom Come
  • Tunnel of Love
  • Exit Now
  • The Passion
  • Texas Education
  • Dumb Supper
  • Good Year
  • Toys
  • Saint Michael and the Devil
  • Invisible Knights
  • The Rain Gauge
  • Ponder
  • Remainder
  • Green Ghost
  • December 13th
  • Dedication
  • Prevailing Wind
  • Dreamland 1911
  • 10
  • On the Median
  • These Things Happen
  • White Water
  • The October People
  • Scene from a Moral Panic
  • Estrellita
  • Another Ending
  • What We're Dealing With
  • How Did the Foxes Die?
  • There was a Man
  • Bio. and credits
Picture
Invisible Knights

Fire and robes stir the white road, 
a white corona of caliche around each torch. 

Come inside a mother shouts. 
She only has to say it once.
Her son turns out the lights very fast, 
latches the break-away screen door. 
It's like the night of a tornado, 
that same dread. 
They feel their way to her room 

and crawl under the bed. 
The telephone is ringing. 
She recites a prayer printed opposite 
a photograph she carries of the Pope 
offering an infant benediction. 
Layers of down muffle the approach 
of a confederate anthem. Our Lady 
of Fatima smiles down on the bedstead 
from her gilded frame. Heartbeat fills 
the woman’s head when footsteps 
thud on the porch. Her boy studies 
and plucks the bed springs. 
Something strikes the house.
She imagines the parade of eyes, 
pillowcases hiding expressions elated 
or troglodyte, smearing her garage 
with threats and papist, protocols 
for tonight's tree lighting.  

Tomorrow will seem like nothing happened. 
She will walk her son to town for a movie, 
climbing the hillside littered with handbills 
and bottles around a patch of charred grass. 
The theater box office will smell of smoke 
and the ticket seller will make change 
without touching her hand.



Borderlands #21, Fall / Winter 2003






























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