by Scott LaMascus
for Robin Davis
 |
He Took His 68-Year-Old Secret to Court and Finally Confronted His Ghost: Robin Davis (above) spent a long career in finance and philanthropy haunted by what had happened to him as a boy. Could an unusual trial on Long Island help him find peace? —Michael Wilson, The New York Times, August 5, 2024 |
The poster boys for this malady
each stare into their mirrors hoping to see the ghost
they would be able to fight now
their feet are no longer frozen to the spots
each stare into their mirrors hoping to see the ghost
they would be able to fight now
their feet are no longer frozen to the spots
of their only crimes — the car ride with a coach,
an after-school job, a church’s back room.
They gather now in a spectral locker room of boys
chosen by chance and dark intention, charged
and armor-plated by twenty, thirty, sixty years
of silent shame driving them to something else.
However much success they find, the juries snicker
and some doze, nodding away at lack of blood
and gore, for they cannot see the fright of spirits
gathered on each side of the glass, a throng of
poster boys facing ghosts who picked them out
of the schoolyards of time. No justice can redress
the fraids on either side of the mirror, peering
in with one hand on gavel and one on a scale,
sometimes seeing the wispy victims, sometimes not,
I suspect. All velocity has settled now into sleep.
The pardon Robin seeks is in that mirror, too,
as he speaks before the harsher judge and jury all in one,
a lone poster boy standing again before his ghost
testifying now into the wisp of time he cannot unimagine.
Author’s Note: This poem puts Davis (and me) into the company of a myriad of ghostly perpetrators and ghostly victims. A “fraid” is the technical name for a gathering of spirits, in this poem’s vision a two-sided confrontation of ghosts of perpetrators and of survivors. The poem also turns on found language from the Michael Wilson article including the three F’s (fight or flight or freeze) quoted by Wilson from the courtroom testimony of the psychologist, Valentina Stoycheva.
Scott LaMascus is a writer and public-humanities advocate living in Oklahoma City. His recent work may be found in World Literature Today, The Writer’s Chronicle, Bracken, Red Door, and Epiphany.