Sunday Calls

By Chard DeNiord
The nurse calls to tell me on Sunday evenings
how he’s doing.
                               How he’s holding his own in front
of the window with a thousand channels behind
the one that saves his screen with snow, fish houses,
and eagles.
                        How the days hang above the ice as vast
recycled pages on which he writes in invisible ink.
How the sun arcs across the sky, then breaks like a plate
above the horizon.
                                    How the temperature drops
below zero at dusk, then continues to fall till morning.
In this way she teaches me how to speak to him in his sleep
at his home in Minnesota, which is the same, she says,
as talking to a friend you’ve never met, but grown close to
nonetheless from hearing his voice.
                                                                   I hear the snow
falling as she holds the phone outside the window.
Silence is the sound of snow falling on snow, I think
as I listen to the flakes inside the air before she closes
the window.
                        “I’m thinking of walleye in their sleep,”
I tell my father.
                              “Of catching them as they dream,
then throwing them back in the hole I drilled by hand
with the auger you gave me as a child, whose handle is stained
with blood from my turning it so many times into the ice
of Bad Medicine.”
                                    I wait for her voice to return, then say,
“Just this for now since any more would disappear the lake
inside his head on which he builds a house for us to fish
throughout the winter.”

Copyright Credit: Chard deNiord, “Sunday Calls” from The Double Truth. Copyright © 2011 by Chard deNiord. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Source: The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011)