Suspicion and Risk
After dark one night—our first
winter in the country—my father,
city boy with skyscraper-size
suspicions, called the state police.
A two-tone farm van, surely
from the downhill neighbors,
had parked down the road
lights blinking in odd patterns.
My father didn’t yet have his
Doberman and Trooper Brookes
answered the call, the van gone
by the time he arrived. He hurried
all worries to the bottom of our minds’
decks, though my father’s eye tics still
swarmed like fireflies around
his Brooklyn stutter. He’d hated
city life, longed to grow his own corn
and asparagus. And then that van
pulled up. So, spring brought
a black and tan pup and by next
winter we could settle into family
games of canasta and pinochle—
where we parked our bids
with just a frisson’s worth of risk.
