On Narrative

1

We were in a little beachfront restaurant 
when lightning struck a man

maybe thirty feet away
rushing for shelter from the sudden storm

a whiteout explosion the shock 
poured down through him

and into the sand
then rose up through the bodies

of his four friends 
and they all collapsed

and were dragged inside
what I’ve learned are Lichtenberg figures

lifting on their chests
as the man struck through the head

was given CPR
his body jiggling mute and pale

and our son closed his eyes 
against my shirt and you tried

to narrate gently what was happening 
and our daughter cried

and that evening the news told us 
the man had died

while his friends were in stable condition
so when the kids went to bed

at last we drank rum
and said repeatedly in different ways 

what had happened

2

It’s crass to admit because a man 
is dead and my children

are still terrified of thunderstorms 
but I know the strange

intensity of this story
and even as I try to honor

the awfulness of the event 
the loss of life and its effect

on all of us who were there 
in its telling

the story becomes a kind of pleasure
if that’s the right word 

I hate to say it pleasure

3

My friend’s husband died 
quietly after a yearlong fight

with the cancer that had surfaced 
inside him

so we attended to her 
for a while then left her

swaddled in elegy
and then it was a month

before I saw her again 
surprisingly at my local bookshop

laughing with a friend I didn’t know 
and I’m ashamed to say

I felt in that moment
that she had betrayed her narrative

without permission from those of us 
who’d tended that narrative

she’d become a story of pleasure 
which was forbidden to her

it was only a momentary feeling 
thank god but it happened

so I’m telling you

4

When I think of lightning 
pulsing down through a man

then rising up from the ground 
into the bodies of his friends

when I think of cancer
dispatching its terrible colonial ships

into new regions of the body 
when I think about a story

spreading outward from its event 
I think of how aspens

my favorite trees
send up suckers from their roots

that have unfurled
like Lichtenberg figures

invisibly beneath the lawn
and this sudden overlay of images 

is what became this poem

5

Literature mostly wants the world 
to be complex intensified

an entanglement of difficulty 
paradox and time

narrowed and compressed
through the strange and disorienting

periscope of the mind
but tonight we’ll have a drink together

while the kids watch their show 
maybe we’ll split a cigarette

out behind our grove of aspens 
keeping alive this one

small illicit pleasure
the tiny glowing dot of us

increasing and diminishing 
for no one to see

this joy
that’s barely worth saying

Read more from Issue 21.2.