Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

William Baer
The Gathering of the Clans
Outside the dance hall, as the fiddlers played,
I came upon him prostrate in the dark:
a wretched drunk, in an ugly lifeless stupor.
Then seeing that he was a distant cousin,
I knew I’d have to go inside again,
amid the Highland songs and quadrille tunes,
amid the fiddles and the dance, to tell
his older brother, who once was a drunk himself.
But then, as if from nowhere, the brother appeared,
coming through the cool, Cape Breton night.
Without a word, I helped him prop the drunken
figure up against a tree, before
he said, to no one in particular,
“I gave him his first drink.” So I left them alone,
alone within that calm ancestral dark,
where patient generations stalk the night.
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 19