The Fire Landscape: Poems

The Empowerment of Trust

The Empowerment of Trust When one student wrote about the empowerment Of trust, how twenty other young women believed They were stronger because a professor taught them To confess and led the class in unison screams, I told her I’d taken a trust walk for credit, That some woman who taught history had led me, Blindfolded, to the smooth edge of a high school stage And turned me in a circle. “Take three steps forward,” She’d said, “because, trust me, your back is to the fall.” Staring at darkness, I’d told her about the man Who’d suddenly about-faced and goose-stepped off a cliff, Certain he’d outsmarted his calculating guide. Once, twice, I blew out the bad air of doubt, fluttered In place until she said, “It’s quite all right,” then paused, Silently breathing, and drew the cloth from my eyes. My student smiled and waited, but I was lying Like a teacher. What did I want from role-playing? To tell her I watched seven friends gangbang a girl Her age who picked the wrong afternoon to be drunk? That there are enough tales of lost trust to complete The canon of despair? My job, some mornings, is To scratch words like anomaly and distancing On a blackboard so a row of hands can record The vocabulary they pay for. I wanted To say I didn’t take a turn, but the truth is That girl puked from chugging beer before my number, And I saw myself so sick and small I could say The horrible, hushed no of leaving. That I lived, p104 1FINCKE_pages.qxd 5/21/08 9:31 AM Page 104 Afterward, with those friends for years. That most of them Joked about the bad lay of the vomiting bitch, And the worst rebuke was silence. That thirty years Later, reuniting, I never once brought up That rape and the absence of remorse. Already, Two of those seven friends had died. I had to ask The names of two others who’d aged so terribly They looked like patients. I repeated that story, And I had a photograph to prove it, showing My student a set of strangers who had returned To a crime scene because it stood for something else. 105 P 1FINCKE_pages.qxd 5/21/08 9:31 AM Page 105 ...