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SLEEPING IN SEVENS
After eating olives on the corner of a car-spotted street,
Sophie tells me when we die we all count to seven,
and from there on heaven is all in black-and-white--
or maybe she'd said that a life-span was set out
in seven chapters, and every one has a different
narrator. Either way, I was sure seven swayed
everything: dwarves, sins, wonders, sages, wars,
thieves, and sleepers. And my poor mother,
who was born color blind anyway, must have
already come to five, her present narrator my father,
who reads so boldly, but is probably dawdling
through six himself--his narrator: Jim Bean.
In that chapter, Jim has an oddly solid voice,
rumbling with the ice cubes in his throat.
He says my father has always known
the number well because he owns seven
rifles with seven bayonets he's only shot seven
times, and I must have been about seven
years old in my first chapter, when my father
told me that for the man who was tortured
in a concentration camp with three fingers
removed by rusty gardening sheers,
the number is all that remains.
Heaven must be one long epilogue,
or the happily ever after in children's books
that we'd like to think exceeds all trials of time
even when Princess Swan Lake has counted
all the way to six and a half, and her prince,
having already passed away from drowning
in the castle moat, still has a handsome face.
Either way, I'm sure the number tags everything:
star clusters, seas, samurai, the day of rest.
In the Bible, seven angels play seven trumpets
to open the door to the seventh seal,
and thus, the world ends and we all die.
Thank God, this happens in the eighth
and ninth chapters of Revelations.
And Sophie, she won't sleep more than six hours
a night because she's afraid on the seventh,
she won't wake up. And my poor color blind
mother gets a preview of heaven every time
she opens her eyes, while the rest of us
are left with only black-and-white movies.
I must be somewhere in my third chapter,
and were my life a play, it would almost
be over. In a novel, I am just beginning.
The narrator must be Sophie who's afraid
of sevens; in this chapter, she tells me to close
my life book, to stop counting the pages.
© John Stanford Owen
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