Metronomes

By Marla Cantrell

Rudy AR

She sits like the Thinker

on a boulder bigger than the courthouse

steps where she married my father in 1944

when he returned from the War

with a fear of the Japanese and a message to my mother to

bind up her bosom or risk ending up like the hula girls

whose breasts, he said, swung like

tilted metronomes above their itchy summer skirts.

In Hawaii

Before his stint in Okinawa, my father

swam among the living coral, drank

bitter beer with Army buddies, buried

his jeep on a beach so far from camp it took

him two days to return.

At Home

My father spends his evenings patrolling

our bush-bare yard where none

of us has ever seen the Japanese.

He looks anyway in the spot where he ripped out

the Weeping Willow, out back behind the well-house,

out front where he shines his light

beneath the fading Chevrolet.

From the Boulder

My mother sees her yard, mourns the

oleander that once spilled red across the gray-board porch.

She watches as my father rounds the house

walking -- that soldier walk --

and works her fingers inside the snaps of her western

blouse feeling the rigid cotton of her bra and

thinks for a time only of metronomes.

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