May 2016
David Huddle
dhuddle@uvm.edu
dhuddle@uvm.edu
I grew up in Ivanhoe, Virginia, a small unincorporated town in southwestern Virginia, where violent things happened so regularly that the people who lived there became accustomed to misfortune and hardship. "Burned Man" was written fifty-some years after the accident occurred, but as I hope the poem indicates, my memory of the aftermath of it was vivid. I've retired from teaching though not from writing—and I suspect my Ivanhoe childhood will continue providing me with subject matter whenever I run out of other topics.
Burned Man
When I was twelve, a man was burned
not quite to death at my father’s
factory. Recovered enough
to walk the town, he didn’t know
what to do with himself—a ghost
whose scarred, fire-bubbled face made you
look away, though not my father
who felt responsible and so wouldn’t
refuse the man’s eyes when they fell
upon him. The burned man held no
grudge, thought the accident his
own fault, and sought my father out
as the one whose eyes told him yes,
he was still alive.
So they held long
conversations on the post office
stoop, which I observed from the car
where I waited, where I could read
my father’s stiff shoulders, the way
he clutched the mail, how he tilted
his head, even his smile that was
in truth a grimace. I knew just
what my mother knew—my father
had to let himself be tortured
once or twice a week, whenever
Bernard Sawyers saw him in town,
lifted his claw of a hand, rasped
out his greeting that sounded like
a raven that’d been taught to say
Hello, Mr. Huddle, how are you?
They’d stand there talking in the town’s
blazing sunlight, the one whom fire
had taken to the edge of death
and the other invisibly
burning while they passed the time of day.
"Burned Man" first appeared in The Writer's Almanac of February 3, 2011.
Burned Man
When I was twelve, a man was burned
not quite to death at my father’s
factory. Recovered enough
to walk the town, he didn’t know
what to do with himself—a ghost
whose scarred, fire-bubbled face made you
look away, though not my father
who felt responsible and so wouldn’t
refuse the man’s eyes when they fell
upon him. The burned man held no
grudge, thought the accident his
own fault, and sought my father out
as the one whose eyes told him yes,
he was still alive.
So they held long
conversations on the post office
stoop, which I observed from the car
where I waited, where I could read
my father’s stiff shoulders, the way
he clutched the mail, how he tilted
his head, even his smile that was
in truth a grimace. I knew just
what my mother knew—my father
had to let himself be tortured
once or twice a week, whenever
Bernard Sawyers saw him in town,
lifted his claw of a hand, rasped
out his greeting that sounded like
a raven that’d been taught to say
Hello, Mr. Huddle, how are you?
They’d stand there talking in the town’s
blazing sunlight, the one whom fire
had taken to the edge of death
and the other invisibly
burning while they passed the time of day.
"Burned Man" first appeared in The Writer's Almanac of February 3, 2011.
©2016 David Huddle