Two Poems

by Amy Hassinger

 

When Asked to Clean Your Room

“Come see my museum,” you say,
and you lead me, a hand on my arm,
to your window seat,
where you have arranged your collection of treasures,
each grouping labeled in careful ballpoint print
on a folded piece of notebook paper.

There are rose quartz and shark teeth and foreign coins
purple fluorite from the Shawnee National Forest
a fold-out folio of state quarters and
an abalone shell, curving like a boat’s hull,
its interior pearlescent and stained with sea.
A long line of Pale Rocks
a short one of Bumpies,
and three eucalyptus nuts, wrinkled brown, like ancestral faces.
In a glass Ball jar half-filled with water,
a grey stone floats, its surface as cratered as the moon.
Pumice, the amazing floating rock! the label reads,
and then close by, there is Not-Pumice:
a small white stone, pocked, too,
but a sinker. Seashells, a fake arrowhead,
a striped hawk’s feather, and two whole rows
of Spotted Rocks.
There is a blue Chinese-brocade pouch, with a sliver of mica inside,
flaky and iridescent, like mineral fingernails.
And finally, your baby teeth,
kept in a handmade cardboard box,
decorated with gold lace and white lamé.

The next day, when you are at school,
and the only noise in the house
is the water cycling through the aquarium filter,
I come and kneel before your museum.
I see how the rose quartz shines, as if with oil from your fingertips,
how the fluorite winks in the light,
how the abalone boat holds steady
as the pumice nestles close to the glass,
and the frayed edge of the white lamé
on the handmade box of baby teeth
lifts into the air
as if it remembers your breath.

We sit, your treasures and I,
all of us obedient
to your gentle alignment.

 

Treading Water in the Dark, Off Savo Island

for Harry Vincent

I know what you want me to remember, Scoop.
You, huddled in Ironbottom Sound
a half-mile from the ship
as it slurps under.
One or two or three thousand men
treading water in the dark
among one or two thousand floating dead.
A man moans I can’t swim
and you—lieutenant, junior grade,
master of the electronic coding machine,
first-in-the-family Naval Academy graduate—
you toss your life belt.
Every few minutes
someone asks you the time.
You check your dripping Girard-Perregaux
until daylight comes.

I know how you’d tell it.
This is a real hero story, you’d say,
and say how, later, after sunrise,
you made your way to a raft of seventy-five survivors—
one who winced at each salty spray, his neck nearly severed.
You swam out to a drowning man,
one-armed him back to the raft.

I know all that.
But what I want to know
is why you held that story so close all these years,
magicking that watch into such an icon.
Grandpa,
The Vincennes lies on the floor of Ironbottom Sound
and you lie on a hospital cot.
The Girard-Perregaux was stolen years ago.

I sat outside last night
above a grove of filbert bushes
the sky a dark sea
lit now and then by distant flares.
A praying mantis ran at me across a tabletop
wheeled its forelimbs in my direction.
I was afraid
for no good reason.
It seemed to see me, is what I want to say,
and I did not want to be seen.

Tell me, Scoop,
is this how you’ve lived?
Have you been treading water in the dark
this long?

 

Amy Hassinger is the author of the novels Nina: Adolescence, The Priest’s Madonna, and After the Dam. Her writing has been translated into five languages and has won awards from venues including Creative Nonfiction, Publisher’s Weekly, and the Illinois Arts Council. She’s placed her work in publications including The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, The Writers’ Chronicle, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Amy teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois, and in her free time enjoys singing with her band, The Jaybirds, and bothering her children.