The Coal Life: Poems

Wild Kingdom

Wild Kingdom My wife talks me into leaving the guest room pink, just in case we have a girl. She’s itching to sew a cover for the window seat. I set up our bed across from the indentations in the carpet where the couple before us conceived their children. I refuse to use the same nail holes for our mirrors. I move the cable lines to the opposite corners of the rooms. In the sunroom, my wife has hung the stained glass her father made for her when she was a child; the lilies and lotus glow in the morning sun. She says we need to have sex at least three times today. Last night she slept with a pillow under her butt. I unpack an old tape of Wild Kingdom episodes. As a kid, I never understood Jim after I figured out that Marlin wasn’t his father: every Sunday squaring off with a walrus or tangled in the diamonds of a boa or jumping from a helicopter onto the back of an elk in snow-capped Montana. Twisting his white moustache, 22 Marlin would say, “Jim, go wrestle that gator,” and Jim would lope to the edge of the swamp. When I was twelve, I climbed three stories of scaffolding with a square of shingles on my shoulder for my father’s one-eyed, Lucky-lipped “That’s my boy.” A gray fox—mangy head, tail as bare as a mimosa switch—rolls across our yard, stretching its neck and scratching its ears, until it lifts its nose and bolts. From backyards, dogs sound its journey all the way to the river. A skink suns on the front steps, its tail an electrical arc. A wren works a blue ribbon into our hanging fern: a few minutes later a twig then a leaf, a twig then a leaf. The begonias perfectly circling the mailbox need watering. I’ll follow the fox instead. 23 ...