Double Life
Mike White
No man ever steps
in the same river twice.
-Heraclitus
If anyone and I mean
anyone
knows where she is . . .
pleads her father
on the news,
and I curse under
my breath, releasing
incomprehensible
hosannas of Good
God Good God
before invoking
his only child, Jesus
Fucking Christ, who
in my childbrain
had once led
a secret double life
as a lamb.
In the early spring, ice
can give way,
so it does,
a red snowsuit
here one minute
and the next
and the next
and the next
until
only the river
keeps moving, a river
that is
never the same . . .
up to his waist,
a father still
calling and calling her name.
“Double Life,” is a brand new poem, and comes at the theme with a particularly literal rendering.
MIKE WHITE is the author of How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (Word Works, 2012) and Addendum to a Miracle (Waywiser, 2017), winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize.