The After
Both before and after our marriage,
I lived alone. So now, in the after,
I return not only to solitude,
but to myself in my thirties
when the mystery of the future
remained unsolved.
Strange, to not yet know
one’s own life story!
In the after, I sit in his chair
so I don’t have to see it empty.
The puppet skeleton still
dangles from his desk lamp
above the paperweight fox.
Mementos. Vestiges.
A picture I took of his walking sticks,
and another of his sock drawer,
strict rows of colors,
so he could dress in the dark.
Vestiges of the mystery
before it was solved.
One by one they fall through
the hole in the new solitude.
September or October
Russell said, It’s September
or October in my mind.
We were talking about
Charlie and Helen,
and his voice was split between
longing for past days
and bafflement,
since at that moment a plow
was passing outside, scraping away
what it could of the snow,
flashing its red and white lights.
Liar to Self
I’ve been ill a long time.
The doctors can’t fix me.
I try on for size
the possibility that
I’ll be dying soon, and feel
a faint shiver of relief.
When I was young,
relief mid-grief is what told me
I was right, when I left a man.
Reliable indicator.
I trust that premonition,
so dying doesn’t scare me.
Small Sting
Almost every evening I feel
a single small sting of anxiety
that I note. Then it goes away.
It postpones knowledge of itself.
Even stranger, it notes that it’s
postponing knowledge of itself.
It—I mean me. I’m a mosquito
whining in my own ear.
Ghost of a Summer Dinner
Defrosting the freezer I found
a prehistoric leg of lamb
that Russell bought,
never to be butterflied and grilled.
I put it in the trash in a plastic shroud,
imagining the part of the leg
that was missing—the shank,
and the little hoof—
long ago eaten, or thrown away
in the slaughterhouse
with the rest of death’s detritus.
A lamb. A leg, uneaten.
The ghost of a summer dinner.
The noisy trash truck hauled
all of it off into the afterlife.
God Blindness
My god was everywhere—
in billowing snow, in the pink evening
light on the paper birches, in water lilies
echoing white and pink in the pond.
Now the leaves of birches
blister in the acid rain,
and smoke from faraway fires
obscures the woods in which
a tomboy animal survived
her childhood, imagining herself
half-feral, unafraid of thunder.
Those woods no longer exist,
and neither does my god.
A new god drives the starving deer
out of the dying wilderness.
