Boyer Rickel /  Cicatrix


The word that’s left out compels the story. The quality of thought for which
there is no word. So events are offered, first in sequence. One evening, the
ball is struck smartly by the bat, the sound reminding a couple in the stands,
this woman and this man who is slightly younger, wearing a visor, of a pistol
report, then their argument in the parked car after the field lights have
dimmed, and after the children have been driven home and the man and
woman decide to park at the edge of a field. Clouds out of nowhere roil and
unload. The watery smear in the rearview mirror distorting what approaches
from behind. Which, in this sequence, is an emblem of the couple’s past.
That’s how she described it later.

To get at it squarely – the seed of doubt that bloomed from an accusation,
the moment that triggered all that was lost – a childhood walk along a
fogged beach was called forth. Not for the walk itself, which was either on
Cape Ann or Cape Cod, but for the fear, first inkling of unknown threats that
the ghostly shapes emerging from the mist produced. It was like that, he said:
I’d never felt so hidden yet exposed.

She recalled the sensation of being at the edge of a very high place. She
couldn’t remember how old she was, or where. The trail carved into the rock
face of a canyon. Sheer drop at the rail of a suspension bridge. The sickening
thrill of it. Like the knowledge when at the wheel of a car doing eighty on the
interstate that one jerk of the wrist and the vehicle will hurtle you to
oblivion. That mortal potential.

Thus the couple’s history as it was recalled and perceived, both then and
now, becomes for them the give and take of analogy. The sketch of their
failure arrived at through indirection. A portrait observable only if viewed
aslant. With no figure at the center, no tangible arrangement of objects. A
hole. A vacancy. Nothing on which to lay the blame. They can name no
reason they should part. They might waste a year or longer searching for it,
in dreams, novels, in the pattern of a fugue or an antique rug.


CUE:  A Journal of Prose Poetry
Winter 2004, Volume I, Issue I