Adam Houle
Poetry
Adam Houle is the author of Stray (Lithic Press, 2017), a finalist for the 2018 Colorado Book Award. His poems have appeared in AGNI, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, and elsewhere. He lives in Darlington, South Carolina. His website is www.adamhoule.com.
Hearing about the Wreck
Now I’m off the phone and pacing while my wife,
seven states away, waits in the smashed car
to relay the incident’s specifics to a bored cop
at the intersection of two wide and busy roads.
It’s a sunbaked Texas town where, I imagine,
the woman who t-boned her sizes up
the grill guard with her pea-patch husband,
both of whom are already scum of the earth,
idiot scum of the earth. Inattentive texting
while driving scum of the earth, who were posting
driving selfies or twitter polls seeking counsel
on which fast food value meal they should shovel
down their maws, chewing with their mouths open
in the living room of what I’m sure is the saddest
half a duplex in all the republic of Texas
while SVU airs and they rubberneck a gruesome case.
In another world, my wife is dead, her body
wrecked in the wreck, and that world chaffs too close
and though she’s fine, alive, shaken but fine fine fine
I’m crying and say aloud, I’d kill them both,
and in that moment, when just moments before
I debated alone paint shades for our kitchen
and asked the dogs what would be the ecological fallout
if a barred owl fell in love with a red-tailed hawk,
I’m pretty sure I mean it, which scares me
in the way it must scare the tv star
who tilts a conversion van off a crushed friend
or rushes back for an heirloom when the foundation beams
have already burst, flames rising from the floor
like geysers, the expected feats of fear and rage,
who realizes there’s another self
that sleeps and, when it wakes, is more terrifying
and courageous and, I see, more cruel, with a drill bit heart
that turns faster and with more bite the more it hurts.
Is he a necessary self? Sometimes, love is the right spring
babbling, bubbling over moss, feeding meadow reeds.
Sometimes, it’s an errant left turn and the sun burning
down the westbound lane fracturing light through a windshield’s
sheen of dead bugs. I sat there a long time,
I made a fist, I released a fist. I breathed.
A fist. I breathed. This fist. My heart’s modeled after it.
Open, it’s to hold or offer.
Closed, oh god of the plains, and I am your vicious club.
“ ‘Hearing about the Wreck’ sprung from hearing about the wreck. Landon was in an accident while visiting family and friends back in Texas, and when she called from the side of Avenue Q, I remember this sort of breathtaking fear followed by an anger toward the world that I’m embarrassed to admit. I wanted to acknowledge that immediate and confusing response. ”
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