The Mink

When the mink ran across the meadow in bunched

black parabolas, I thought

sine and cosine, but no —

the movement never dips

below the line. The creature vanished

into barberries. Absolute

predator who cracks a rabbit’s spine

in one bite. And my mind

leapt along a track to a summer field

where I walked years ago

to a stony spit out into the North Atlantic

with a young man I hardly knew, and his sister.

He was bald, dying

of a brain tumor. I ignored

his illness and we spoke of history.

He was gentle, scholarly. Why

do I remember him

when it was his sister I painted seated in tall grass,

her forehead wide, brown hair framing her face,

ocean a cobalt swatch behind?

Islands humped in little arcs across the bay.

That canvas is stacked in a closet.

But it’s the dead boy

I’ve stored inside me all these years,

scared of the otherworldly light

around his eyes. Scared and ashamed

of what I didn’t know. Ashamed of my fear

that made his death, when it came,

unspeakable. So history bounds

into the present, glitter-eyed, with musky anal glands

and daggering eyeteeth. Because that boy

wasn’t dead: he must be killed again.