spaced months apart at first but then more often.
I never got caught though, except by her.
I’d come home late at night, and there she’d be
staring at me, so pious, old, and ugly—
although she didn’t guess the half of it.
So things went on like that until one night
they caught me cold, and I still had the gun.
VI.
In prison everyone’s a little crazy—
nothing to do and lots of time to do it.
So soon you either fasten on some memory
or lose your mind. Most guys just choose a woman
or a special place, but who knows what it takes
to make one thing stick in your mind for years?
Some people there, who barely talked outside,
would ramble on for hours about Sue
or Laurie Jean, Lynette or dear old Mama.
I knew a fellow who talked all day long
about some Friday night five years before
when he’d gone drinking with his older brothers.
He sat there trying to remember it,
putting each scrap exactly in its place—
the car, the burger joint, the brand of beer.
And when no one would listen anymore,
he sat at dinner by himself and drew
street maps of his hometown on paper napkins,
carefully marking out the route they traveled.
Madness makes storytellers of us all.
I was no different. Think of it this way:
I lay there in my cell for seven years
and stared up at a window blank with sky,
day after day when nothing came in view.
My cell was littered with unfinished books.
The chaplain always complimented me
for reading, but he didn’t understand.
The stories didn’t matter anymore.
I grew to hate them. Writers lie too much.
They offer an escape which seems so real,
but when you’re finished, nothing ever changes.
The things I wanted couldn’t come from books.
I used to make up games to pass the time.
My favorite was called Roommates. I’d catch
a horsefly or a cockroach in a jar—
that would be roommate number one — and then
I’d look behind the toilet for a spider.
I’d drop him in the jar and see what happened.
I liked to watch the roommates get acquainted.
Know what I learned? That spiders always win.
At night I tried to keep myself from screaming.
I’d lie there listening to the toilets flush,
the bedposts scrape the floor, the yard dogs howl,
the guards who shuffled down the corridors,
the fellow in the next cell jerking off.
I had to think of something to keep sane,
and so I thought of her, of everything
she did for me, of everything she said.
I looked into my heart and heard a voice.
It told me what I must have known for years.
VII.
When they escape, most guys head straight for town,
steal anything they can, get drunk, get laid,
and then get caught. They don’t know what they want.
I knew exactly why I’d risked my neck.
I made it quite a distance before daybreak,
but, when the light came up, I started shaking.
I’d killed a guard the night before. I’d scaled
a barbwire fence that sliced up both my hands
and slithered through a slime-wet sewage pipe.
But I had planned that part back in my cell.
The thing I hadn’t counted on was sunlight—
the sun and open spaces … there were no walls!
I had forgotten what the world was like.
I started crying. Can you picture me
standing there stunned and squinting like a mole
someone had flushed out of the ground to kill?
What a damn fool I was — stumbling around
in prison workclothes on an open road.
I tried to hitch a ride, and right away
a lady picked me up. She said I looked
just like her son in Tulsa. She talked a lot.
There’s always someone stupider than you.
I ditched the car at nightfall in a field,
and walked the six miles home. I knew the way.
VIII.
I walked up to the house, then went around.
The front door was for company, not me.
I went up to the kitchen porch and knocked.
I was afraid that she’d look old and sick,
that I would lose my nerve, but then she answered,
looking the same and acting as if she
were not at all surprised to see me there.
She looked the same, and yet I realized
that moment how I had forgotten all
the features of her face. More likely I
had never really noticed them at all—
her freckled skin, the bump along her nose,
the narrow tight-drawn lips which formed a smile
that I had seen before, not just on her.
It was the smile I greeted in the mirror.
I never knew till then where I had learned it.
How strange the people we are closest to
remain almost invisible to us
until we leave them. Then, on our return,
we recognize the faces in our dreams.
I saw her calmly now. And what I saw
was an old woman close enough to death.
How pointless my revenge seemed in that moment.
Nothing could redeem the past — or me.
I had no right to come and stand in judgment.
IX.
These thoughts took just a moment, then I heard
“I’ll set another place for you at supper.”
She had a way about her, see? A way
of putting everyone back in their place,
no matter who they were or what they wanted.
She knew that she had won. And didn’t care.
That’s when I noticed she had set three places.
Reading the question on my face, she said,
“I have another boy who lives here now.”
I told her that I wanted to wash up,
but went instead back to the extra bedroom,
and walked right in.
I guess I must have scared him.
He was a scrawny kid with short red hair,
not more than twelve with narrow mousy eyes.
He sat there on the rug, his mouth half-open,
his baseball cards laid out across the floor.
I knew the room. It hadn’t changed at all.
The blistered paint, the battered bed and desk
still moaned about the cost of charity.
He crouched there looking at me silently.
Watching him tense, I knew how many times
that angry men had come to him before.
He had the wisdom of the unloved child
who knew he had been damned by being born.
I closed the door behind me. Frantically
he gathered up his cards to stash away.
They must have seemed more precious than his life.
As I came close, I didn’t say a word
but took the cash I’d stolen from the guard
and held it out, “Take this and walk to town.”
He knew that money never comes for free.
He took it anyway and slipped outside.
I walked back to the kitchen quietly
and saw her busy working at the sink.
She must have heard me come into the room,
but wouldn’t turn to look me in the face.
And I came up behind her all at once.
Then it was over — over just like that.
I felt a sudden tremor of delight,
a happiness that went beyond my body
as if the walls around me had collapsed,
and a small dark room where I had been confined
had been amazingly transformed by light.
Radiant and invincible, I knew