The Victims

When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it and took it in silence, all those years and then kicked you out, suddenly, and her kids loved it. Then you were fired, and we grinned inside, the way people grinned when Nixon's helicopter lifted off the South Lawn for the last time. We were tickled to think of your office taken away, your secretaries taken away, your lunches with three double bourbons, your pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take your suits back, too, those dark carcasses hung in your closet, and the black noses of your shoes with their large pores? She had taught us to take it, to hate you and take it until we pricked with her for your annihilation, Father. Now I pass the bums in doorways, the white slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in their suits of compressed silt, the stained flippers of their hands, the underwater fire of their eyes, ships gone down with the lanterns lit, and I wonder who took it and took it from them in silence until they had given it all away and had nothing left but this.