By Jane McKinley
We had a rain last night. It thundered and I woke up sitting up.
I imagine I’ll be more or less allergic to thunder for some time.
– From a letter written by the poet’s father, Philip Myerly McKinley, from a hospital in Italy, June 1944. He served with the U.S. Army’s 138th Infantry Division in the North African and Italian Campaigns.
Is that why you had to see the front—
heaped-up rainclouds flattened on top
like an anvil struck by Thor? I remember
how we’d pile in the car when thunder
rumbled. You’d drive west to a high point
past the river to watch the storm roll in.
Did seeing it silence the trigger?
After your funeral, old Wilmer told me
you’d returned from the war “like a shadow
without a body”. Mom told us stories
of your honeymoon years—the insomnia,
nightmares, how hurt she was until
the night you woke up screaming,
“Go haul your own damn potatoes!”
After she died, we discovered the letters
of your courtship in the old secretary.
In ’46 you took her to the latest Disney
fantasy, Make Mine Music—already gone—
so you had to sit through Cloak and Dagger.
Mom wrote to her folks that you got “nervous
jitters,” had to duck out of the theater.
Your kid brother told me how you’d paced
the upstairs hallway at night—more animal
than man. You spent whole days knee-deep
in the river, flicking your rod to send
the line soaring in an elegant dance
to banish the horrors, your mind fixed
on being—mesmerized by light on water.
Jane McKinley is a prize-winning poet and Baroque oboist. Her debut poetry collection Vanitas received the 2011 Walt McDonald First-Book Prize. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Five Points and Tar River Poetry among others. Mudman, her upcoming poetry collection, was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. The title recognizes her father’s service in Italy during WWII where soldiers endured relentless rain and mud, earning them the nickname Mudmen. To find out about Jane’s work go to janemckinley.com.
