Once Bitten, Twice Shy

A Poem

Illustration created by Midjourney

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Once Bitten, Twice Shy

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Old man Pete released his two dogs and stood 
by the trailer’s steps, sniffing the damp air, 
watching the tan clouds tumble in the brown 
morn. A vertical scar beneath each eye
marked where the mother lab bit him when he,
a stupid runt, had touched her nursing pups. 
“Once bitten, twice shy,” mom remarked. And he
vowed he’d never let it happen again. 

And it seemed that the stink of the trees and 
the yard, made pungent in the glancing rain,
was less rank than the reek of the stabled
trailer. “Hurry up,” Pete muttered as the mutts
milled about in the scrubby grass, sniffing 
the mess they’d made. Then, unexpectedly—
then at this early hour, from a gap 
in the clouds, fell a colored shaft of light, 
a dim misty rainbow that came and went
and came and went again, and with it brought 
a memory of long ago. 

He was born less than a mile away,
to a loving family in a rural 
town, wedged between the bend of a creek and 
a patchwork quilt of small farms and tilled fields, 
deep in the tornado-lashed plains of the
smack-dab-in-the-middle Midwest. It was 
a place where pies, fresh-baked, still cooled
on the oaken window sills of slate-floored
kitchens hung with cast-iron crockery, a
place where the household’s laundry was scrubbed on
galvanized washboards and hung up to dry
in the backyard’s pole-stretched lines.

On the dirt road that led to the schoolhouse, 
Pete would walk with his best friend Eddie, an 
arm flung by one o’er the other’s shoulder. 
With green plastic army men, they played in
the sere crisp cornfields of early winter,
where the dry cobs and shriveled husks became
the burnt-out tanks and blasted bulwarks of 
those ill-imagined battlefields where
their dads had fought in the Second World War. 
As they grew, so did their fondness for each 
other. And on a muggy summer’s night, 
loud with the katydids’ passionate whirr, 
in the moonlit loft of Farmer Lester’s 
barn, they shared something great, something new,
something fearful. And again and again,
in those dark secret places. And again 
and again in the watches of the night. 
No one knew, no one guessed, no one ever 
ever learned, though the townsfolk commented 
on the boys’ close bond. “Like brothers,” they said. 

On a cold brown day, a day much like this, 
Eddie pointed to a rainbow in the 
sky. They crossed the street to the town’s one bar—
Was it ’67 or ’68? 
He no longer knew, he no longer cared.
They sat side-by-side. And Pete punched Eddie’s
shoulder. Eddie ordered two of whatever
was on tap. But Pete felt a chill because
Eddie had flinched at the touch. “We were boys,” 
he said and shrugged and lit a Kent, then flicked 
the lighter shut. “I met a nice girl in 
Memphis when I was there last week. Her dad
runs a hardware store.”—Pete heard nothing more.
He looked up, sad, and thanked Floyd for the beer.
“I’ll be back, of course, from time to time,” Eddie 
said, as they stepped outside. “We’ll catch up then.”—
“Yeah,” Pete said, regarding the bleak tan clouds
and that dim misty rainbow that seemed to 
mock him now. Why had Eddie pointed it
out to him, if he’d already planned to
say what he had said? 

Old man Pete called to the dogs: “Come on, now!”
They ran up the steps and barked at the door.
“Of course, I’ll be back.” Of course, he never came. 
And Pete never married, never met “the
right girl,” never left that small Midwestern 
town, and never let himself fall in love
again. . . He’d been bitten once.