Melodrama

A gunshot: the trigger so light

he’d hardly known he pulled it;

another man’s pistol grabbed from

an antique table with clawed feet

that he had bought last week—

before the fight and her departure—

bought driving to Memphis, the late

honeymoon they had been planning,

not realizing the antique salesman

was such a rascal, the same rascal

who’d shown up at their wedding

in Knoxville, oh, two months back,

a wedding in an art gallery with

watercolors by his cousin, delicate,

gray landscapes of the Smokies,

the cousin who’d brought the friend

nobody knew, an antique dealer

who flirted with his wife, his bride,

a girl he had loved since high school,

since tenth-grade history, the teacher—

whose name he couldn’t remember—

who he’d once helped change a tire

on her van when she broke down

high up on the parkway and where

the boy had stared across the valley,

as if at a string of tomorrows, their

abundant on-goingness to the haze-

shaded horizon, an April morning,

the valley with its meandering river,

white barns, cows like black pinpricks.