Andrew Kuhn

Utica Sestina

A long-boned gliding boy in rain. He’d run
in any weather deep into the fall
in hail sometimes around the river’s bend
alone beneath the tall green drugstore clock
so lightly passing that he seemed a trick
of vision in the window of each empty store

and when he’d pass the whitewashed grocery store
his father many years had tried to run
he did not tense or vary pace or fall
behind the others in his mind or bend
the facts he knew or glance up at the clock
but ticked along and picked the miles up trick

by trick the way his father with the trick
knee used to do when business at the store
got slow and no-count pals of his who’d run
up tabs with him they’d never pay would ‘fall
by’ as they put it just to sagely bend
themselves to cards beneath the broken clock

some beer distributor had left — a clock
that told no time yet still displayed the trick
lights of a city river nightscape. Store
the memory away and neither run
away nor towards what cannot change but fall
in with the rhythm of what’s coming. Bend

yourself to what you could not ever bend,
yourself — the world that briskly cleaned the clock
of guileless guys like his nice no-trick
pony of a dad who knew what was in store
yet could not either make a stand or run
away but chose instead to merely fall

in place so that his one son saw him fall
for years yet never break but only bend
as if his dumb defiance of the clock
that ticked out “life is elsewhere” did the trick
and meant it wasn’t so and that his store
of hope and energy would never run

out, until it did. The son took the clock,
locked the store, did not run the river’s bend
but walked. It was no small trick not to fall.