VINYL POETRY

Volume 3, May 2011

BIRDIE
Robert KlossView Contributor’s Note

excerpt from The Alligators of Abraham

Remember your father returned home from what the newspapers speculated was “exhaustion of the nerves” or a “delirium” and your mother called, “his terrible melancholy.” Remember the papers reported how your father raved to “persons unseen.” How he fired his revolver at shadows and bayoneted the wind. Remember your father home and how he wore his uniform through the day and into bed and removed his cap only at dinner hour or at church service. Remember your father returned home intoxicated by the advancements in technology lately made. He had watched men alive and coiled within in barbed wire. He had observed their greened and their eyes burst for unseen gases. Remember how your father brought you to a mounded tarpaulin in the backyard and how he pulled this aside to reveal the red machine silent beneath. “The salesman suggested steam powered,” Father explained, “as the fuel is readily found.” Your father, however, had long understood the importance of the combustion engine and had opted for the gasoline machine. “It may not be as accurate or as gentle as that mower you have known but I have found in these years about the land that often the greatest success comes through the methods most brutal.”