You Could Learn a Wolf

The Supreme Court Justice nominee contemplates the ungroomed path on the night before the Senate Judiciary Hearings, September 2018:   

Beneath the saddles, we were stallions stampeding in a train-throttling thrust and crush of praise and glory, securing our names: Savage, Daddy, Boss. So help us God, we were whet for the stomping, the pressing hunt, even knowing their names. Hers still unravels in my throat across the nights, Christine, Christine across the years, the bar exams. A name I’d clamp shut as my wife rowed me down the River Styx to a vanishing shore where I could let her voice go, her no still sluicing the channels. 

*

You could learn a wolf, observe it encircling your camp for months, know when it will strike. But the predator who walks down the street into your home, stoking the grill, cracking open a beer—harder to make out. Her voice ripples into every port I hide, still can’t escape her name and the naming the thing I did to a girl. I solemnly swear I was there. I saw her alone, pinned her, covered her mouth with all my force. I release my hand, choking her life and mine. Stone me to death or release the stone from my neck.

*

I could visit my daughters someday, teach poly-sci at a college by the sea, train as a plumber, live in a small RV, work as a plumber on leaky pipes. I could caulk rust-gaps, ruptured valves; not a lesser thing to be a man doing honest things with honest hands, so help me laboring from the lower courts, I can make every home I enter—the two front doors, the basements and kitchen sinks—into a safe, and heard, and nurtured thing. I can water the blue mandevilla climbing the trellis wall.

Robin Carstensen‘s poetry manuscript In the Temple of Shining Mercy was awarded first-place in Iron Horse Literary Press‘s annual chapbook contest, and published by them in 2017. Poetry and prose is recently published or forthcoming in Equinox, RiverSedge, Jacar Press, FlowerSong Press, and many more. She coordinates the creative writing program at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi where she also serves as co-founding senior executive editor for The Windward Review: Literary Journal of the South Texas Coastal Bend.