The Word for One Who Runs Away
I was four when I broke my grandfather’s leg
and he died. I was eight when I broke
my own leg, the femur twisting up near the hip
like one of those tubes of Pillsbury dough,
and I spent a month in the hospital in traction
but did not die, was not carried off at night
by strangers to be turned to wax and clay,
which confused me. We had been playing tag.
There was a gap, of course, in reality between
the time he fell and the time he died,
like the gap between his being It and me slipping
just out of reach on the stairs, or the gap
between his simply wanting to live and cancer
already hollowing his bones like cardboard…
Anyway, I was four and he was It and I ran and he fell
and broke his leg and died, and when I touched
his hand at the funeral it felt fake, like clay
or uncooked dough, and they told me nothing
had been my fault, but I guess the moral is
blame bakes in, or maybe it’s don’t go running
from things you love, or after them if you know better,
at least not on the stairs, when instead
the kitchen is warm and you could be sitting
in front of the oven, Christmastime, 1989,
Robert Quantrell,
still alive.
Kent Leatham is a proudly pansexual poet, translator, and public educator. His work has appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Fence, Able Muse, and Poetry Quarterly. He studied poetry at Emerson College and Pacific Lutheran University, taught in the California State University system for almost a decade, and currently facilitates the Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium monthly reading series.
I was four when I broke my grandfather’s leg
and he died. I was eight when I broke
my own leg, the femur twisting up near the hip
like one of those tubes of Pillsbury dough,
and I spent a month in the hospital in traction
but did not die, was not carried off at night
by strangers to be turned to wax and clay,
which confused me. We had been playing tag.
There was a gap, of course, in reality between
the time he fell and the time he died,
like the gap between his being It and me slipping
just out of reach on the stairs, or the gap
between his simply wanting to live and cancer
already hollowing his bones like cardboard…
Anyway, I was four and he was It and I ran and he fell
and broke his leg and died, and when I touched
his hand at the funeral it felt fake, like clay
or uncooked dough, and they told me nothing
had been my fault, but I guess the moral is
blame bakes in, or maybe it’s don’t go running
from things you love, or after them if you know better,
at least not on the stairs, when instead
the kitchen is warm and you could be sitting
in front of the oven, Christmastime, 1989,
Robert Quantrell,
still alive.
Kent Leatham is a proudly pansexual poet, translator, and public educator. His work has appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Fence, Able Muse, and Poetry Quarterly. He studied poetry at Emerson College and Pacific Lutheran University, taught in the California State University system for almost a decade, and currently facilitates the Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium monthly reading series.
