Melodrama
A gunshot: the trigger so light
he’d hardly known he pulled it;
another man’s pistol grabbed from
an antique table with clawed feet
that he had bought last week—
before the fight and her departure—
bought driving to Memphis, the late
honeymoon they had been planning,
not realizing the antique salesman
was such a rascal, the same rascal
who’d shown up at their wedding
in Knoxville, oh, two months back,
a wedding in an art gallery with
watercolors by his cousin, delicate,
gray landscapes of the Smokies,
the cousin who’d brought the friend
nobody knew, an antique dealer
who flirted with his wife, his bride,
a girl he had loved since high school,
since tenth grade history, the teacher—
whose name he couldn’t remember—
who he’d once helped change a tire
on her van when she broke down
high up on the parkway and where
the boy had stared across the valley,
as if at a string of tomorrows, their
abundant on-goingness to the haze-
shaded horizon, an April morning,
the valley with its meandering river,
white barns, cows like black pinpricks.
