in parentheses

William Heath has published three poetry books: The Walking Man, Steel Valley Elegy, and Going Places (Alms for Oblivion is due in the fall); two chapbooks: Night Moves in Ohio and Leaving Seville (Inventing the Americas is due in the fall); three novels: The Children Bob Moses Led (winner of the Hackney Award), Devil Dancer, and Blacksnake’s Path; a work of history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (winner of two Spur Awards and the Oliver Hazard Perry Award); and a collection of interviews, Conversations with Robert Stone. He lives in Annapolis. www.williamheathbooks.com

W. Heath has been previous featured in In Parentheses.

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The Myth of Flight

    for Hugh Kenner

The classical assumption is

sons should obey fathers,

but had he not built the device

to satisfy the queen’s lust

and the labyrinth to contain her

monstrous get, what need

to invent the wings of wax

tempting the boy to soar

too high, lose his feathers

to the relentless sun, fall

to a watery death?

The strange marriage on

a sand flat of a box kite

and a bicycle, the damn

contraption achieving flight,

what happened at Kitty Hawk

is in all the books, but what

the Wright boys did is as much

part myth as what a designing

father once made to free

his son from the amazed

Minotaur’s dominion.

Artists: Then & Now

Are those broken pots

archeologists find in middens

due to slippery fingers,

floors of stone, or perhaps

some finicky pot-thrower

seeking perfection

in a cup, a bowl, a plate,

smashes in frustration

askew efforts that fail

to meet her standards,

achieve a work of art,

just as a writer, in the days

of typewriters, pulls out

a botched sheet, crumples it,

and sends it sailing toward

a circular file overflowing

in a far corner of the room.

Fire

If someone cries fire

in a crowded theater

suddenly we realize how

confined the seating is,

one person at a time can

exit a row, two at most

through a door, no wonder

this causes a pandemonium

of screaming people ruthlessly

competing with each other

to save their own skins. 

A panicked mob behaves

like those around them

were fire too. Some are

trampled as if to stamp out

the blaze. Try to tell those

who died self-restrait

might have saved them                                                          

Fire is insatiable, everything,

however diverse, goes up

in the same flames, leaves

the same black scar. We

ask who started the blaze,

but the fire doesn’t care.

Ubiquitous, it can appear

at any time and any place,

consuming all in its path.

Man once fled from fire,

then he learned to hold

a firebrand without fear.

A small matchbox contains

the power to destroy

an entire forest, one splinter

tipped with phosphorous

can start a conflagration. 

Bats

Birds hunt bugs by day,

bats work the night shift.

Their sonar system keeps

them from colliding with

stalactites in a dark cave.

The echoes of their calls

tell them how to navigate

the night air. This same

system helps them locate

and eat various insects.

When bats cry out we

do not hear them, their

high-decibel shrieks

sound like silence.

Losing It

If a squid loses the tip

of an arm to a rival squid

it knows it’s been hurt,

its whole body reacts,

becomes hypersensitive,

but it doesn’t know

which arm suffered

the painful loss. 

If a squid loses part of an arm

to a rival or a crab’s pinchers,

it jets away squirting black ink.                     

The squid never touches

the severed spot, rather it acts

as if its whole body

was one big sore. 

Unlike a squid,

an octopus knows if

one of its arms

has lost a tip, or been

otherwise injured.

It will cradle

the wounded limb

to protect it from

further harm.  

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