Knute Skinner: Two Poems

          Getting a Headache

I was getting another of his headaches.

There I was, preparing for a good-enough day,

when it made its quiet appearance,

showing itself only in a forced smile

as he walked back into the house after checking the tyres.

But I didn’t get it at first.

It was only the averted eyes and the soundless sigh

as he picked up the picnic basket

and then as I marshalled the kids

that told the whole story.

But true to form, when I asked him,

“It’s nothing,” he said,

making sure that it would be,

for the rest of the long day,

something indeed.

         No Turning Back

The hedge alongside us ended

at a very high wall.

As the wall was too high to scale,

as the hedge was woven tight,

and as there was no turning back,

we had but one option.

The niggard path that offered itself

was generous only with thistles,

and except where it swerved from brambles,

it closely followed the wall.

The squashed cans and broken bottles,

half hidden on either side,

seemed remnants of another time,

bequeathed to nature by people long since gone.

The wall, we assumed, went somewhere

and so too the path,

but the wall remained very high

while the path grew harder to find,

the thistles more thick.

The Front Door

And when they reached the front door,

we sat very still,

hands gripping hands.

Perhaps they would simply ring the bell,

and perhaps, after a while,

they would leave us alone.

We saw them first in the trees,

eschewing the obvious pathway

which led up to the door.

But even as we fixed our gaze,

they were lost from sight,

swallowed by foliage and mist.

They were, we decided to decide,

a trick of the mind.

And it was only by chance

that one of us looked again.

We were going to open the door, but—

once one of us stopped at the window—

then everything stopped.

And now we are very quiet,

afraid to breathe,

our knuckles turned white.

In a minute or two—

we have to believe it—

they will go away.

Knute Skinner