Lives

by Brian Daldorph

There is a woman sitting across from me
in our office, telling me that her only child,
her fifteen-year-old daughter, ran away from home
and for twenty-four hours she thought her daughter was dead.
Then she found her with a gang of punks downtown.
Her daughter said that their relationship was all a lie,
and that if her mother forced her to come back home
she'd run away and never come back.
The woman turns her palms up,
What can I do?

There is a woman sitting across from me
at Bucky's in the harsh yellow plastic chair
telling me she's been sober for a year
after getting out of de-tox
on her eighteenth birthday.
Now she's taking it one day at a time. She says
that her Dad was drunk on the couch
for the first ten years of her life,
that addiction's in the family.
Bucky's manager has turned out the lights,
we're the last two people in the world.

There is a woman across town from me
telling me, on the telephone,
that she got so drunk on Friday night at her party
then woke on Saturday morning, wrote a note,
took an overdose, then threw up
the pills, the booze.
Her friend took her to Emergency.
She spent the night at a psychiatric hospital.
Through hell, she says, and back to class.

There is a man sitting across the room
in shadow, but I know who he is.
His brilliant eyes burn through shade.
He tells me that if I sit still and listen
then all the stories of the world will come to me,
and that I must love the women who bring them
because they pay for stories with their lives.

 

"Lives" is the opening poem of Outcasts
(The Mid-America Press, 2000),
by Brian Daldorph, assistant professor of English.

(Illustration) Detail from the jacket of Outcasts, a new book of poems by KU faculty member Brian Daldorph.