David Bottoms

December, First Frost
June 12, 2014 Bottoms David

December, First Frost

 

A small green house sits beside the highway, fading into maple shade.

It must be evening.

 

Inside the house my father tapes a match to the end

of a straightened coat hanger.

 

The pilot light in our furnace has died,

and now that the furnace grill leans against a door frame

 

a dark hole lies open in the floor of our hallway.

Who knew the dark goes down so far?

 

My father squirms on his stomach

and shakes a valve, and into that hole he stretches his arm.

 

The lit match dies

as a hiss rattles out of the burners.

 

Why do I think that voice an admonition?

 

That same afternoon

on a ridge beyond our neighbor’s pond, I’d trembled

 

near the mouth of a cave.

David Bottoms’ first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump (William Morrow, 1980), was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared widely in magazines such as The AtlanticThe New YorkerHarper’sPoetry, and The Paris Review, as well as in sixty anthologies and textbooks. He is the author of seven other books of poetry, two novels, and a book of essays and interviews. His most recent book of poems is We Almost Disappear (Copper Canyon Press, 2011).