by Bronwen Wallace

Early evening     there’s a
late model car in a driveway
two men standing beside it     one
has his hands still on a lawn mower
and as you pass the other says
“you just can’t get them out of your head”
he could be talking about anything
women    the words to a song
but it’s the way his voice sounds
in the half-light and now you’re thinking
accident    on the way home from work perhaps
the ambulance pulled up to the side of the freeway
and in that blurred instant of the side window
a heap of something on the curb
covered with a sheet
so that now it’s ominous
the way tricycles and wagons lie abandoned
on front lawns the edges of sidewalks

like those mornings when
you’ve sent the kids off to school
poured yourself another coffee opened
The Globe and Mail and on the back page
there’s a tiny article
about an unemployed machinist who
drove the family car off a bridge
killing everyone and an even tinier one
about a school teacher
castrated by a hitchhiker
and as you sit there in the kitchen the squeak
of a clothesline being pushed into the sun next door
is suddenly fragile and important
like that clipped end-of-the-day edge
on the voices you hear now from still
opened windows the voices of women
calling children to baths and pyjamas

behind you somewhere two men stand
in shirt sleeves talking of     what
nightmare voices
but when you turn
they’re gone
the lawnmower leans neatly
at the side of the garage
and the houses are
hesitant the way houses are at dusk
as if uncertain of limits
what to hold in or keep out
though even as you turn
lights are coming on
and the houses square
around windows     grow
darker     more
sure of themselves

Bronwen Wallace (1945-1989) was a dedicated community activist and feminist who began writing seriously in the mid-seventies. Her poems and short stories have been anthologized and have appeared in periodicals across the country. She won a National Magazine Award, the Pat Lowther Award, the Du Maurier Award for Poetry, and in 1989  she was named regional winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in the U.K. Five volumes of her poetry have been published as well as a book of essays.