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2004 PAGE 11 Len Roberts The Coin Trick Good one, he whispered when the dime disappeared behind my ear or I pulled it from my mouth, my shirt pocket or jeans cuff, holding it up as proof of the magic he'd taught me, that quick reach into darkness where nothing had been and then the gleam beneath the kitchen's dim bulb. Good one, Good one, he'd whisper again, afraid to wake the woman asleep in his bed, clapping his small hands without a sound, the beer-stink of his breath drifting to where I clinked the coins onto the table to show the positions of Guam, of Guadalcanal, three of them lined side by side for the Panama Zone, a quarter for his brother's grave, another for the green bathtub brimmed with ice to break his malarial fever, a dime for our empty flat in Cohoes, a nickel for my brother, his son, who walked Albany's Veterans Hospital's green halls, pennies for the others I tried to name before he swept them into a mound and started flipping to see how they'd land, calling out heads or tails that split-second before he slapped them into my waiting hand. SHENANDOAH/COUNTING THE BLACK ANGELS The List of Most Difficult Words I was still standing although Gabriella Wells and Barbara Ryan were too, their bodies dark against the wall of light that dull-pewter December afternoon, shadows with words that flowed so easily from their mouths, fluorescent and grievous, pied and effervescent, words I'd spelled out to the rhythm of my father's hoarse whispers during our nightly practice sessions beneath the dim bulb, superfluous, excelsior, desultory and exaggeration mixed with his Schaefer breath and Lucky Strike smoke as I went down The List of Most Difficult Words with a man whose wife had left, one son grown into madness, the other into death, my father's hundred and five-pound skeleton of skin glowing in that beer-flooded kitchen when he'd lift the harmonica to blow a few long, sad riffs of country into a song while he waited for me to hit the single l of spiraling, the silent i of receipt, the two of us working words hard those nights on Olmstead Street, sure they would someday save me. POETRY, THE SILENT SINGER:NEW & SEL The Drivers My five-year-old son rides the twelve-volt yellow car into the field of wildflowers, beeps his horn at the cat who zigzags madly before him, switches on and off the low-density lights, turning around just once to see I am still following. It doesn't matter, though, he won't step on the brake, won't swerve around the first tier's slope, instead goes over it, out into the fields of straight spruce, where, as he veers in and out of the rows, it's clear how much he is the driver my father was, speeding to eighty miles an hour at the upstate New York winter curves, the madman who whirled the Golden Eagle truck onto Lake George ice in early April, drove it the entire length trying to make a perfect figure 8. The one who never once told me to slow down, to go straight, who gave me two of his last four dollars an hour before he died, blowing wheels of smoke into the yellow kitchen air, singing with Tommy Edwards, Please Love Me Forever into the idling engine of the night. Quarterly West In book: Dangerous Angels © All Copyright, Len Roberts.
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