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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers & Poets Scenes | | Dreams DAVID CHESTER ___________________ For the Want of a Ritual Pagliacci went first - the zebra-striped clown floating sideways on the surface - and for weeks our fish have been dying. Nightly I find new gills chewing gauze, eyes cocooned in the body: pale, inverted, swishing. Dawn provides the carcass, stiff as a new comb. I skimmed and flushed the first, but it wasn't enough - not for something I'd named. So I moved poolside, set fire to toothpick pyres, fizzed the steaming fish husks into the chlorine. Now the neighborhood cats claw my windows like chalkboards, and I walk quiet circles around the tank, watch corpses rise and float, while the living peck at the ceiling of dead bobbing above their heads. [719]
This Week's Lesson You will find a caterpillar, inching sticky-footed on your porch, a fuzzy white stripe bordered reddish brown, yellow lines along each side and aqua ovals that will make you think of amoebae. You will coax the wooly larva onto your palm, take it inside to the daughter you were assigned to give birth to last semester and amuse her with it, one day before she turns nine months old. She will study the exotic creature as it wends around the stem of your pinky and her brain, reveal her gummy smile when you touch her hand to its fur. Her giggle will fill the room, lifting the furniture to the ceiling and changing your voice like helium. You will tell her it will soon be a butterfly. You will remember last week's class: you showed her a tiger swallowtail, a patch of yellow and black stained glass balanced on a fuchsia crepe myrtle. Her attention span brief as a camera's flash, she will squirm and you will put her down, the sofa will fall, and she will wobble off to her googly-eyed Cookie-Monster doll. You will return the caterpillar. Two nights later, the moon will be in its final quarter and your daughter will fall asleep in her crib. You will slip out to the porch and light-up a Camel, draw hard and exhale generously, watch the cloud of smoke chimney upwards through a banana spider's sublime doily, taut [720]
between the gutter and eave. In it you will note two rows of brittle legs suspended from the web and a narrow, bald husk, the life sucked out and into the gold spider, grown bulbous with your infant's laugh. You will go inside to bed. You will dream of this until next week's class. [721]
Pascal's Wager Belief in God is rational: if God does not exist,He'd just finished inventing the syringe when cramps rushed him to his physician who suggested leeches or a hiatus. So he sold his lab, moved to Paris and became a poker maven. The experiment failed: he became obsessed with probability theory, had aching torpor for several months, till one day he looked down at his cards and the Queen of Spades spake John 3:16. Knowing the odds of this surpassed the odds of winning with his hand, he raised - and won the largest pot he'd ever seen, took his winnings and entered a monastery: where the monks encouraged him to resume his studies. He did, and soon died in profound pain from a growth in his stomach that spread to his brain. [722]
David Chester is a poet, actor, and lawyer. His poetry has appeared in Antioch Review, The Quarterly, and The Cape Rock. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his poet wife, Ginny Grimsley; his five year old, demagogue daughter, Eliot; his shaman pug, Owen; and his provocateur calicos, Abbey and Gracie. "For the Want of a Ritual" first appeared in The Quarterly. |
