What Did the Children Know and
When Did They Know It?

                              What Did the Animals Know and When Did They Know It?
                              — Wall Street Journal, Jan. 4, 2005

                      I kept the secret well.
A tsunami had struck Southeast Asia
            and 43,000 people were killed. That's

                      what they said at first, somewhat
loudly, somewhat pointedly, somewhat unmistakably,
            on the radio, on the day after Christmas.

                      But the girls were playing
Yahtzee, or watching that hilarious Fawlty Towers
            video for the nth time, or

                      practicing their dance steps, or doing
each other's hair, or toasting smores through the
            side door of the woodstove,

                      the Christmas tree winking
at us from the other room, not yet as dry
            as tinder, and though

                      I didn't turn the radio off — and
it kept going on and on, the steady accretion of
            horrific detail — it somehow

                      couldn't compete with their
industrious pursuit of the funny video, or the
            violin, their absorption

                      in the smores, or whatever
it was that they were doing. I didn't
            turn it off; I let it talk

                      alongside them, wondering
when they would notice, sort of incredulous
            that they hadn't, but not wanting

                      to stop them, to say something.
Now, reading the Wall Street Journal
            today, a week later,

                      I realize that they, like the antelope
stampeding the shoreline in the state
            of Tamil Nadu — ten minutes

                      before the tsunami hit — or the elephants,
leopards, deer, and other wild animals
            who escaped unharmed in Sri Lanka,

                      had already found high land,
a little island, that
            would not break. You see,

                      I wasn't just keeping
the secret of the tsunami. There was something
            else in the house. How often

                      I'd wished they'd overhear,
preferably my side of the story, so that I would not
            have to know alone. But my girls had

                      already proceeded inland.
They were balancing on their new exercise
            balls from Borders, watching John

                      Cleese, as Basil Fawlty — with the
woman in the video, "Polly," the maid, who in real
            life was, for a long while, at least,

                      his wife — his helpless antics
in the face of events that he couldn't control,
            events that became all the more

                      idiotic and perverse, as he
tried to twist them in service of his petty pride
            and vanity, and we all died

                      with laughter watching him,
balancing on our balls, holding our secrets
            in our mouths like big marbles.

Dana Roeser
Antioch Review
The End of Time
Volume 64, Number 3
Summer 2006

Copyright © 2006 by the Antioch Review, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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