The Fall of Morning  

She walks

The woman walks

Before dawn
Before her husband's alarm clock slits the morning
Before her cider breath children wake from their jumbled sheets
The woman walks down the hallway of flaming yellow elms
stuck broomstick handle down
She wears her father's old football jacket
over her nightgown
and slippers
and carries a plastic grocery bag of newborn kittens

She didn't intend to walk the tunnel street
Didn't think she'd be hurrying across the busy street
- Early risers in loud cars dragging business card leaves
behind them like wedding bean cans -
She hurries across, not wanting to be seen
worrying that she is jostling the bag of kittens
each in its own wounded sock from her darning bin
She enters the next cathedral aisle of arching elms
this street better than hers
pillared mansions quiet as bungalows
and she takes them down a notch thinking
they are still stick naked sapiens
drooling their last dreams
onto machine-picked cotton

The kittens are a jumble of light dumplings
still damp from their mother's tongue

She had thought there would be water in the pail
below the garage downspout
Thought she could drown them there
wrap them in an extra grocery bag
and dispose of them in the alley garbage
But the five gallon pail was tipped by a child
too early for ice
evaporated in the night

The neighbor had a rain barrel out back
and she'd creaked the gate to check
and found it long siphoned through a garden hose
onto flannel covered tomatoes

And so she walks
down the alley to the street
two blocks
and then three
The mewing bag
logoed and noisy
in the bathwater warm air

She stops to kick a stone from her slipper
before a blind house
has trouble returning it to her foot

When she reaches the river
she hooks the grocery bag
on a driftwood twig
and lets the bag fill with silent current
then pads to a patch of draping grass on the bank to wait
she finds a dried menthol cigarette
and a paper match
in the pocket of her father's jacket
and watches the smoke float downstream
thin as memories
of her father's chair
his laugh
his jiggling lap

There I go
she thinks
there I go

She retrieves the bag from the river
shakes the kittens from the socks
in a small damp shapeless heap
and buries them with wet sand
She wrings out the darning socks
plops them back in the thin bag
and climbs to the streetlights
the clattering streets
her husband's dry toast, watery egg
and sympathetic nod
the house where her children are too young to understand
why she goes out every morning before dawn
with a bag of balled up socks
in her nightgown
her slippers
and a menthol cigarette
in her father's jacket

© 2006 Gordon C. McRae