WANTING THEM BACK was first published in The Southern Poetry Review. It was subsequently published in Cathy’s first book, The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas, which won the Texas Tech University Press First Book Award (now called the Walt McDonald Award) and was published by TTUP in 1992. The book was reprinted as a trade paperback by Iris Press if 1997 and is currently avaliable.

WANTING THEM BACK

In September we grew sick
of the cicada's impenitent whine,
the beetle's clicking,
raw thorax and bumble of harvestfly.

Even the humminghirds
buzzing like neon thumbs
around the bulbs of sweetened water
we had hung from the gutter ledge.
Good riddence we said
when they left for Mexico.

Now, as early as December
we are tired of talking to ourselves,
of the body's noisy machinations,
the blood knocking
like a tribe of pygmies beating sticks.

One morning we find ourselves at the window,
staring up at sky's vacant lot,
wanting them back.
Like childhoods we wept to grow out of.

Like the man who looked on
as the boy he had carved from pine
turned suddenly flesh,
his painted-on hair bristling to life
as he leapt to the floor running,
astonished at the ruckus in his chest,
at the strange old man at his back
who kept crying Be wood! Be wood!

© Cathy Smith Bowers, 1990, 1997.