Guests of the Nation

By Peter Mladinic

L, a poet, was married to a poet,
more recognized but not as good as she.
We rendezvoused at the beach one day,
and after a few hours
she followed me to my parents’ house,
not close but not terribly far from the beach.

An early summer night.
My mother laid out a meal of cold cuts:
ham, salami, baloney,
cheeses and bread. A light supper.
L was preoccupied, worried really.

Her car was low on gas and the latch
to her tank wouldn’t open.
The talk was all L’s predicament
at the table in the dining area
back from the kitchen.

Two windows faced a back yard.
Light came through the windows as L
ate a little and worried so her trouble
became my parents’ more so than mine.
My father got some device, not a crowbar
or anything, to damage her tank.

Out front of the house my father worked
the device, my mother looking over his
shoulder, L also looking, and I detached,
but out in the street as they were.
Finally he pried open the latch.

L followed me in my car to the nearest
gas station, then a few miles to a circle
where she got onto a highway
that led towards her parents’ home
where she’d been staying, while her poet
husband was off on a series of readings.

Not too long after this latch incident L
died in an auto accident, a one-car fatality.
She hit a tree.  A few years later my
parents died, my mother at the start of the year,
my father at the end.  I was teaching
Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation.”

Bonaparte narrates the story.
Like Belcher and Hawkins, prisoners
suddenly executed, lifeless in a bog,
L and my parents, so intent
to get the latch opened, know all
about everything, everything or nothing.