In the mirror: my flesh
seems stable, but maybe…
any minute. The mechanism.
It runs and it goes on
running. Why can’t Richard
walk? I don’t know
how Parkinson’s is formed.
Richard goes out
to mow the lawn, his wife
is not home, and it’s
(I later checked)
over 100 degrees in July.
And the body
stuttered, just pulsing standing holding
the mower for dear life
and I ran across the street
and when I grabbed the switch
he fell. Inching up
the sidewalk, arm in arm,
I dial Toni and begin
“Richard is okay, he tried
to mow the lawn…” Waiting.
He seemed crushed
about the body
breaking down. It looks
mostly the same. Once, Amy and I
moved across the country
and after days
got to the apartment we had rented
but the woman we rented it from
had been fired
and no one knew
about us, our agreement
by phone, from five weeks ago
that there would be a key.
One a.m.: but isn’t this
the place? We were looking
at a paper map. And the gate code
had worked. The body, the arms
of the body ached from holding
the steering wheel all day.
Richard’s feet have turned in.
He knows the number of steps
to the front door. When the body
freezes, he tells me,
he sings a song,
and there’s a spot in the song
that when he gets there
he can set the foot down.
There’s a melody. Now 2 a.m., Amy and I debated:
Is this where we live? If yes,
then we can go in
through this unlocked
window. We believe this
to be our place, from the phone
five weeks ago, and from
the paper map in our hands, therefore:
I rattled through the closed plastic blinds
and fell on my back into an empty room—
Hello? I said, Hello?
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 1.
Craig Beaven’s first collection of poems is Natural History, winner of the Gerald Cable First Book Award. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2016, Tin House, Third Coast, Pleiades, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and many others. He currently lives with his wife and children in Tallahassee, Florida.
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