Twelve Years Ago I Leave You Stay
D.A. Gray
Every time the temperature quickly drops
in Texas—the scene replays itself.
You are parked near the arms room,
running the car engine for heat.
I’m in uniform, duffels hanging from each shoulder
by one strap, waiting.
Draw weapons;
board the bus; attend the farewell ceremony;
ride to the airport; become the stranger
that neither of us know.
Some years around here it never freezes,
but at this moment stuck in amber
the ground is hard as limestone.
We’re looking at each other, stoic.
Everything is fine. Everything is fine, we say.
With time and rain, rock expressions dissolve,
become holes in our word. But that is too far
away for the actors in this scene to see.
We say we don’t believe in omens.
Then the car battery dies. Then a cold wind
whips around the building edge. Then
the buses don’t arrive. And we stand,
huddled around the hood running jumper
cables from a buddy’s car and cutting
the silence with jokes about checking
one’s equipment.
What we think we know
at this moment will change. We don’t know how.
Summer will return, hotter than last.
We’ll find ourselves shivering on lonely nights
when the air cools to ninety degrees;
our minds will make up sounds in the silence.
Everything will be fine, we’ll tell ourselves.
We’ll meet back here and whatever remains
will be the important pieces of our lives
that we knew we wouldn’t lose.
We’ll tell ourselves.
And on a night like tonight
we’ll catch each other staring from our kitchen,
under a stark naked light bulb, standing
on a cold tile floor, scanning the dark
exterior – as if the window were a watchtower.
But we won’t ask. We’ll feel
the air begin to cool. And we’ll know.
D.A. Gray is the author of Contested Terrain (2017) and Overwatch (2011). His poems have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Comstock Review, Still: The Journal, and Wrath-Bearing Tree, among others. He holds Masters Degrees from The Sewanee School of Letters and Texas A&M-Central Texas. A veteran, Gray now teaches, writes, and lives in Central Texas. Of his two poems in Collateral, he writes, “The residue, even a decade after returning home, is that of having a foot in each world—one in the present and one far in the past. An existence punctuated with silent moments. ‘Country Dark’ and ‘Twelve Years Ago I Leave You Stay’ come out of that residue.”