Chard deNiord Poem

THE POLICE

We were in bed when a knock came at the door. Our bed was next to the front door since we had given up our only bedroom to our two children and partitioned off a part of our large living room with standing book cases into a second bedroom for us. It was ten thirty on a Sunday night. The knocks resounded hard and quick. I was reading Czelaw Milosz's The Witness of Poetry in preparation for a seminar the next morning. My wife, Rachel, was reading Soren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Irony. "Who could that be?" I asked, rising naked from bed and putting on my kimono. I opened the door onto two police officers. "Come in gentlemen," I said. The uniformed men entered and stood over our bed. Rachel pulled the sheet up to her neck. I stood at the end of the bed. "We're here because a Mrs. Little called. She said she's been trying to reach you since yesterday, but the phone's been busy." I picked up the phone by the bed and heard a faint static through the receiver. "The phone is broken," I said. "We got in this evening, officer, from a weekend trip, and haven't used the phone since we got back. Maybe it was that tornado that knocked it out." The policemen stood sheepishly together. Rachel smiled with embarrassment for her mother. I, on the other hand, had a strange impulse to invite the two policemen into bed with us, but said instead, "Would it be too much to ask one of you to call Mrs. Little back to assure her that we are O.K.?" They were kind Midwestern policemen who said they would be happy to do this. I imagined them climbing into bed with us and falling asleep, while we stripped them of their uniforms and put them on ourselves and held their empty weapons to our necks and heads and groins and kissed each other over their veteran bodies while they slept deeply in their exhaustion. We thanked these men for their prompt response to my mother-in-law's concern for us. I wanted also to tell them, You have given me a larger sense of myself as well as assuring me of something I wondered about before, namely the inherent goodness of the police whose abruptness and armed appearance and lack of tact and laconic style I forgave this time because my mother-in-law was concerned about us and had nowhere else to turn except to you. But I knew also that they didn't expect this and probably wouldn't have understood my sentiment exactly. Strangely, what I think they would have understood and probably responded to if their duty had not prevented them from getting too close to their public was an invitation to come to bed with us fully clothed, for it was late, they were tired, and this is what we wanted.

"The Police" published in AGNI 37.
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