The limitless choices of the dispossessed
clutter the park. Benches, well-lit day rooms,
and clean laughter from a past that, confess
it, was never less than full—all are dooms
that gather as small hymns against slowing.
Sooner or later, even the harsh tunes
of spring are played on utensils grown
blunt against tables and teeth. Grief appears
in the headlines and stays news. Just showing
your face is work enough. If anyone hears
a story, it sounds familiar. Take this one
for example: When I was eight years
old, my parents took me to a nursing home
to see my great aunt. I don’t recall her name
or the reason we went or why I had to go.
What I remember is this: as I came
close, she caught me, pulled my face to hers.
She never said a word, but all the same,
she made me swear. That near, I saw the blur
in her eyes, smelled the sore on her cheek
that would not heal. And when she was sure
I knew, she let me go. I could not speak
it, the secret I came to understand
years later, the way the future leaks:
silent, certain, squeezing fissures in a dam
that breaks one day, a promise from the past,
to change at once the surface of the land.
The body’s excess erodes its last
impulse toward silence. We can’t conceal
the monotonous tunes, or that stare cast
across parks, across day-rooms where we deal
to death a solitary hand. We become
the secret we swore never to reveal.
Originally published in Cider Press Review, Volume 1.
