After Examining a Row of Eleven Skulls and Thinking of My Ex-Wife
A Good Walk

After Examining a Row of Eleven Skulls and Thinking of My Ex-Wife

I should put the murderous past on display. Each skull
An incident stripped of flesh, a memory boiled to core
Bone:  even the mind, the will, the intelligence—gone.
Only the shell remains. I am Hamlet bemoaning Yorrick
And how he is lost to time. I am Mr. Kurtz announcing
My gluttony, my reverie of the mysterious rites. Skulls
Are symbols and powerful, but not while on display—
Set on the judge's evidence table:  see what we have killed?
They are books already read, knick-knacks gathering dust
We no longer feel compelled to enjoy. All our past
Is out of place. The living is gone. These skulls
Should be buried or put in storage. The trial is complete,
And the warlords have all been hung. The bones of the dead
Are separated and cataloged.

A good rain will send them tumbling
Into the jungle, and soon the vines will grow through the eye sockets
And the sloths will carry them away and the monkeys will throw them
At each other in play and all that will remain are the shards,
The puzzle pieces from a picture we can no longer recollect or desire
To put together. See them now. Tomorrow they are absent.

A Good Walk

The other evening as I placed the eggs I had purchased
In their own bag, separate from the others and level,
I recalled my friend on his second return from the desert.
We were golfing; he seemed uncomfortable, searching
For balance on each shot. A hawk killed and dismembered
A pigeon near the final hole; the grey feathers bloomed
In a circle under a pine.

At the bar, he confessed
The paved streets irritated him, the neat rows in grocery
Stores, mowed lawns. Once, he said, they were patrolling
In a city whose name I've chosen to forget. The sweat
Pooled in his collar and elbows. A wind from the mountains
Rustled the bushes. It's not all desert, he said; it's never
What you're told or what they choose to show. Colorado
Has dunes, too, and waterfalls. We were looking for bombs
In the trash beside shops. A mosque had disintegrated
Two days earlier. By now, we were expert—not careless,
Not cavalier, but not afraid of each little twitch or uneven box.
I paused when I saw the plastic bag. We rarely found
Plastic in rural villages. The bag was heavier, lumpier—
I thought they were discarded melons, but the smell
Forced me to slit the side, and three boys tumbled to the dirt.
They wore school uniforms. They had died in the explosion.
I thought I saw bullet holes.

I can't forget the one
With a necklace, a strip of cheap gold chain and a crescent.
Only one boy had shoes, and they had no laces. Each
Had flies darting in and out of his nose and mouth. No one
Claimed them, though the town mourned. The boys seemed
To be holding hands, and the heat had melted them together.
The doctors cut them apart, separated them neatly for display.

The next time I saw my friend, he was boarding a plane
To see his wife and kids, dressed in khakis with a black belt
And collared shirt. He smiled, waved, and walked inside
Where I imagined him wrapped in cellophane, embryonic,
Whisked through the heavens. I wish him a safe journey.

Kyle Torke is the Colket Fellow in Reading and Rhetoric at the Colorado College and an Associate Professor at the United States Air Force Academy. He publishes in every major genre, and his screenplays have won awards. World Audience released his most recent book, a collection of short stories, in 2009:  "Tanning Season." When he's not teaching "The Tempest" or Anne Sexton's poems, he's instructing his children (Conrad, Coover, Ava, and Liv) in the fine art of alligator wrestling and how to write in the grand tradition of heroic meter.