Issue #1 Winter 2002
Dinosaurs
by Douglas Goetsch
for Stephen Dobyns
It
is the first day of summer, and it feels like it
to
the man walking home from work —-
not
just heat, but something electric in the breeze,
the
swishing of skirts on bare thighs,
whistles
of shirtless bicycle messengers,
dogs
high in buildings barking to one another.
At
home he pops open a beer, sinks into the couch
and
thinks back to the summer he moved to the city:
He
would throw himself into the night
like
a boy into a great wave, fill himself
with
beer and see where he’d wind up.
Once
he went home with a Wall Street stock broker,
a
petite woman who kicked off her shoes,
headed
for the refrigerator and came back
with
a syringe and a rubber tube tied to her arm.
It
wasn’t until the edges of the pool in the spoon
were
bubbling that she remembered her manners
and
offered him some. He found himself
waking
up midday in other boroughs —-
one
time in New Jersey with no shoes —-
and
would make his way home by bus or train
like
a swimmer, pulled out by the undertow,
stroking
back to shore.
He
still feels a smoldering in his blood
on
an evening like this, but by now he knows
the
odds of going out and getting lucky. He hears
the
stabbing of high heels on the floor above,
pictures
women across the city
readying
themselves, a thousand keys turning
in
tumblers simultaneously, locking him in.
He
zaps on the TV: the Nature Channel.
Somewhere
in the Dakotas they’ve found
a
Tyrannosaurus Rex. “Dinosaurs,” a scientist
explains,
“are the greatest success story
in
the history of the planet.” Men and women
pick
at the landscape with dental tools as the scientist
speaks
in millions of years —- this million
and
that million. “If this is the age of the Earth,”
he
says, holding out an arm for a time line,
“then
dinosaurs lived from here to here” —-
he points from his shoulder to his wrist —-
“whereas the age of man is equal to the tip
of my fingernail.” The man on the couch gets
up,
goes to the window. At nine o’clock,
on the longest day of the year, there is still
light, behind the jagged scaffold of the city.
He will need a way to fall asleep. There’s
more beer
in the fridge, an unopened fifth of scotch,
pills
behind the bathroom mirror, NyQuil.
©2000 Douglas Goetsch
Douglas Goetsch is the author of four collections of poems, most recently First Time Reading Freud, winner of the 2002 Permafrost competition. His work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, Crazyhorse and in the recent anthologies Split: Stories From A Generation Raised On Divorce (McGraw-Hill) and Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology Of New York Poets (Melville House). Goetsch lives in New York City, teaches creative writing to incarcerated teens at Passages Academy in The Bronx, and answers e-mail at DGoetsch@nyc.rr.com.