The
Rose Epiphany
Little woofer, big woofer.
She held them leashed.
The poodle sat down easy;
the shepherd jerked her
this way and that, sniffing at the yard,
trying to get down to the grit,
where the real smells live.
A kind of panic touched her.
She’d brought me, free of charge,
a warning.
Said quickly, in the staccato prose
of the neighbor passing along more
than news of the latest divorce:
“Mrs. Rose was coming down her drive
this morning, and right over there,
the other side of the lane,
she saw something long and dark.
Curious, of course,
she drove up beside it to look, and saw a man
—a young black man—
lying there dead.
Scared and all, she came
to our door and knocked,
wanting to phone the police.
I went out to see myself,
hardly able to believe it;
I wanted to know
how she knew the man was dead.
And God! before I’d gone three yards,
there he was—shot,
his arms sprawling back over his head,
his eyes staring out at nothing.
I’d never seen a murdered man before.
Just stood there
trying to take it in, to shape
my mind around it.
Probably shot somewhere else
and dumped here.
That’s what they do: kill a man
and find some nice neighborhood
to leave him in.”
She looked at our connecting lane, unsure.
Touched by her tale
I thought:
What agony must be going on
in some household
at this moment?
What nonchalance of hands
as the file clerk drops into his dull manila sea
one more white sheaf
of uncontested facts?
My neighbor, unnerved, rattled on.
“Lock your doors,” she said.
“We have to look out
for each other. Cars I never saw before
keep parking in the lane.
Just sitting there…
Lord, I wish we could leave.
When we moved here I thought
we’d have some peace.
Well…now I know the truth:
There’s no peace anywhere”
She tried to calm herself,
gripping the leashes.
Quizzically, the dogs looked at her,
waiting for their cue:
Cerberus and his little sometime friend.
I had no answer for her,
and thinking maybe
I was in shock at her story,
she walked away, or was pulled by the shepherd,
into that afternoon’s
new-found callousness.
She wasn’t quite through, though.
Before disappearing back down the lane,
she turned and said it again,
as if I hadn’t heard it,
as if I didn’t know:
“There’s no peace anywhere.”
Copyright © 2003 Robert Champ