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George T. Hole, Ph.D.
Bio: George T. Hole, Ph.D. Distinguished Teaching Professor Chair: Philosophy and Humanities Interests in addition to poetry: Academic
Works: Getting Rich: The Secret It’s 6 o’clock. Saturday. The clock chimes as Mrs. Lynch reaches into a locked cabinet. She pours a drink into a tall glass with ice and walks quickly out of the kitchen. She always wears the same big bathrobe, like my father’s. Was it her husband’s? He was taken away in an ambulance and never came back. Bathroom water is running. Finally, she must be safely upstairs. I watched her through the keyhole in the back hall door. She is pretty, like my mother. I am about to become a thief. I told my father I want to be rich some day. As he fixed a leaking pipe, he told me to get a job. Not what I wanted to hear. Didn’t want to hear it next day either. He said extra money would help to pay for my clothes. I don’t want to get rich to buy clothes. Certainly don’t want to get rich by working in the neighborhood. Like end of summer vacation, it happened. Well, it didn’t happen right away. I knocked on all the doors down the street except where the blind lady lived. I once had to go to her house with a cake mother made. I rang the bell. I rang it four times before I saw her coming. She walked like Frankenstein with hands sticking out. As she got closer I saw one eye—it was turned straight up to the ceiling. I dropped the cake and ran. I was afraid to tell mother what happened. Do people who keep bad secrets go to hell? I had a nightmare about an eyeball chasing me. I remember it when my father drives us out of the way passed Kimmler’s house. He always tells me about the axe murderer, the first guy to get the electric chair. Bad luck: my father found a woman who would give me work, cutting grass and other odd jobs. He told me to go her house and knock. I was glad he knew the doorbell didn’t work. Mrs. Lynch told me to come in. The house smelled of perfume. She had birds in cages and a cat. She would pay me to help her every Saturday afternoon until 5:30. I was afraid to ask how much. Her blond hair was cut like my mother’s. Anyway, I began doing what my father called making a living. I didn’t get paid much and he took half. He told me a story about a man who got rich by putting his nickels in the bank. I know you can’t buy a bicycle in a bank. I come out of my hiding place. The cat is sitting in the dark beside the refrigerator. One ear is ripped and its tail is cut off a few inches from its butt. It just stares at me. Once, on the radio was a believe-it-or-not about a cat that read people’s minds. Its black fur and yellow eyes remind me of the priest hiding in the confessional. I watch it for two minutes and thirty-two seconds. It doesn’t blink its eyes. I can’t keep my promise to watch it for five whole minutes. Got work to do. I walk carefully, as I practiced in the cellar, toward the jar where Mrs. Lynch keeps her dollar bills. I never heard the floor creak before. Hair on my arms stands straight up, electric. I reach the top shelf. The cat snarls. Lightning strikes in my head. On the floor—glass and money all over. Who's there? a man’s voice upstairs, I know, splits the silence. Run, I tell my legs; run forever. Let me forget. I now know getting rich isn’t easy. Lying, I will learn soon enough, won’t be easy either for me or for my father. Under a Potato Crate My love pushes hard to roll Me off my back so I will stop Screaming in a dream I struggle like hell To awaken from. The dream goes and hides In the dark. I try deep exhalations To rid my body of chemicals I inhaled when Doctors cut twice, opened my neck and belly, To cut out cells multiplying daily Multiplying faster than loaves and fishes. I am too tired to get out of bed to urinate— Let the diaper do its shame-saving duty— Let me piss out the medicines that kill pain And kill any thinking while scar sites curse, almost out loud. Odd, I remember, my brother and I trespassed In the field with no far fence, where we would Get spanked if we were found out. We turned Spiky reeds into poison-tipped spears just in case We had to fight wild animals or Indians. We snaked among sun-high corn stalks following Our cross-bred hound when we stopped dead, as if facing Dad's strap in his raised hand. The dog's stiffened body Pointed, before it leapt upward into a thrashing of sounds. We knelt toward the bundle in his mouth. An eye flickered among brilliant-colored feathers. Hiding it under our shirts, hiding it from the dog and our excitement, We got the pheasant home alive, in the cellar, Safe under a potato crate. I think now about the pheasant waiting As we waited for our father to come home. We did not think The neck of a pheasant would feel the same hatchet as a Sunday chicken's. Neither my brother nor I, honored hunters at supper, Could eat that plucked and roasted, that disguised after-life. We nick-named the dog Lucky, who After hunting dreamed with his legs jerking and muffled yips, Dreamed the perfect chase after the perfect rabbit. Sometimes we would rub his belly to make him run faster And make us laugh. The name stuck. Looking through the Venetian blinds at the first Lines of morning light, I imagine the pheasant waiting And nameless others, under sheets, under sleep, under anesthetic, waiting, And underground, waiting, for resurrection. What radiation, I imagine already aimed, waits for me next? What half-life? What knife? One more final, blank ending—when I feel like the pheasant at the moment of capture, fully like The first flicker of eye-opening hope, feel The brilliant art of feathers and the urgent feeling of flying upward, Free, for the moment, from my five-year survival prognosis. |
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