Things I Didn’t See
- Things I Didn’t See
Maura Stanton, Santa Fe, Batman movie shootings
I only saw the stump and yellow tape,But the waitress at dinner described fireZigzagging across the sky to torch the treeOn the plaza, the one shading the benchWhere I sometimes sat to eat caramel cornAcross from the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe.
I didn’t see the downtown bridge collapseBut I knew my sister crossed it every dayWhen she left work in Minneapolis,And I waited anxiously for her to phoneWhile the newscasters interviewed survivorsAnd showed the submerged cars and diving crews.
I only drove around the edge of AuroraOn the empty toll road as I left ColoradoThe day after the Batman movie shootings,Listening to relatives sob on the radio.I kept speeding between big rigs, headed east,The Platte River marked by lines of trees.
And I didn’t see the kid loft a brickThrough my mother’s back window as she napped.I didn’t see him going through her drawersUntil she woke and called out, “Who are you?”But now I see, over and over, the thingsThat didn’t happen because he ran away,
Leaving a knit glove on her dresser topMarked with his DNA for the police.My mother lifts her walker’s rubber tipsAs she floats lightly forward to greet meWhen I arrive. The window’s boarded up.The cat, who saw it all, just looks at me. [End Page 70]
MAURA STANTON won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition for Snow On Snow. Her most recent book of poetry, Immortal Sofa, was published by the University of Illinois Press. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in the Southwest Review, the Atlantic Monthly, the Yale Review, the Hudson Review, and the Southern Poetry Review. Her short story “Oh Shenandoah” appears in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2014.
