Scott Withiam
BIRD IN A FOREST
The first time my father struck my mother,
I didn’t see it happen, but heard a sound
I could only equate with one potato picked
then thrown to a harvested pile of them.
And then I saw the place my mother had been
standing, in the same place another time,
near the kitchen stove, while cooking breakfast
for the whole family, and her housecoat caught
fire, though then, more a whoosh, in which
those tiny terrycloth loops snapped
like pine needles igniting one to another
at breakneck speed. My father grabbed
the porcelain baking dish soaking in the sink,
and doused the fire, at the same time screaming,
“Your own damn fault. You’re not
paying attention!” as in, after the fire
extinguished, the soaked black smudge
on her housecoat was a destroyed forest.
And the trees still sighing hidden
in both parents saying, “That could have been
so much worse.” Later, I came back
to my mother’s new satin pink housecoat,
the rustle of it, as it fell from her
knocked out of it, as hearing then spotting
a bird in that forest as a sign of life
returning, not her scrambling back
into the housecoat and off the floor
faster than any flame, but her
as the loose string found and flown
into the living room, feathered
into the nest of my father’s leather
recliner. That’s because I had gone to her
there, kept calling “Mom!” “Mother?”
but she didn’t move, stared silent
for a long time, as if somebody
seated, growing more and more
comfortable before a fire,
though able, finally, to call back,
“I don’t want you here, ever.”
—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024
__________
Scott Withiam: “I wish this was one of those poems about which I could say, ‘It wrote itself.’ That would nicely distance me from any uncomfortable personal associations with the incidents portrayed in the poem, and with poems I write that I am often too quick to judge as self-absorbed therapy poems and then drop before finishing. I long knew, however, that my father had struck my mother more than once, and increasingly disturbing, the longer this remained buried the incidents turned insignificant, minor. Too much of that (increasingly disturbing, the longer this remained buried the incidents turned insignificant, minor) going on these days. The imagery poured out as soon as I went back to that childhood kitchen, but it, and the various scenes found in the poem, came out disjointed. Much like the feeling after trauma or reasoning with trauma or the nature of any recovery, at any level, I soon thought, ‘so maybe use that in the poem.’ The images, meanwhile, felt alive with possible meanings or directions and seemed to, in subsequent drafts, begin to fit within shifts, or sometimes both shift and image worked together, heightened each other. Those are the highlights of how this poem seemed to come together, and that description may sound as confusing as the poem started out. Anyway, finished, I thought the poem came close in its portrayal of the confused sense of a helpless witness and the hidden magnitude of destruction to ourselves and others.”
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