April 10, 2009

A Chirping in the Brain

by Luca Penne

Not Emily Dickinson’s “giggling” but a chirping in my brain, like a smoke detector whose battery is failing. I feel this, but refuse to panic. The light in the trees is summery. The rasp of a distant chainsaw asserts a human presence. Already, though, swamp maple and sumac redden along the road where marshland sprawls unashamed.

No wonder that when dozing off for a few minutes in slanted heat I recalled the post office of childhood, where I discovered in the trash sample drugs discarded by local physicians, who never dreamed that demented children would poison themselves to induce a possible high. Of course I didn’t take the drugs but sold them practically at cost to schoolmates who ingested them without achieving anything except a giggling in the brain. Not that the nineteenth century notion of madness applied. Seventh graders never quite go mad; they get even. One stole my lunch, another told the principal I’d sold phony, ineffective drugs.

Twenty years later this crime returns as a chirping so faint I’d mistake it for a fledgling, but the fledglings all have flown. The sloped August light is too stiff to heal parts of me I’d rather forget. When I check the mirror I’m still there, although my unwilled expression seems fixed like a daguerreotype, proof against what’s coming.


*Luca Penne is just an ordinary guy whose work has appeared here and there.

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