Fire Baton: Poems

The Crocodile Dream, Every Seven Years

The Crocodile Dream, Every Seven Years It’s sepia. You’re seven, padding down the cowpath to a faraway boathouse and out of it there leaps a crocodile bigger than the boathouse. You turn, run back uphill, stumble, let go of the book (a valuable condensed book, gilt on top of all its pages) and it rolls, it flips right down the lake bank, hits the water. Yes, the crocodile is gaining on you. But you have to save it—someone else’s book. And so you fling yourself down the steep bank, into the water, there’s another splash behind you, you hear water drip from teeth and wake. You’re fourteen, Technicolor, hired to find a lost medieval manuscript illuminated, legendarily, with gold and lapis, buried in a barn. Your trowel hits rock? No, box; you open up not rotten wood pulp but a vellum—look, the crocodile is coming. When you run mud sucks your shoes off. You slip up a ramp that leans into the chicken coop, hope, slide on feathers, falling, feel the crocodile’s cold breath . . . 31 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 31 And say you’re twenty-one, the town you live in an agrarian stronghold: agora, baths, surrounded by plowed fields, surmounted by a temple built of marble the veins of which spell words—the entire house of your tribe’s pantheon is carved with verse, with moonlight, shadows moving in the serifs . . . They’re going to tear it down to build Big Macs you argue brilliantly against and lose. You pace, tear-blinded, back to that carved marble, into the catacombs and hidden river beneath the building. There the crocodile. And why not let it eat you? But you run again, wimp, and emerge on the great floor before the altar where they’re nailing up a salad bar. You stop to catch a breath. They drop their work. The sneeze guard shatters. Now the crocodile stands by your side, your friend, your terrifying ally as they flee. If all that happened, then, at twenty-eight, wouldn’t you throw yourself at sleep, for what must be some miracle of crocodile/ dream-self collaboration? And what if that crocodile, the crocodile of hope, appears beneath newspaper: scum of ads and op-eds and embedded AP wires in a vacant office park’s reflecting pool, trash, floating fragments of a snout and skull? 32 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 32 You could skim out the bigger teeth, at least, and bury them in your own skin: a sharp pacemaker, an annoying contact that blinds one eye, a line of curious blue scars. And you could train for thirty-five when God knows what fanged things will leap from you to your assistance in the next campaign. 33 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 33 ...