Speechless
Faces pass by like unheard explanations
April rain
pinging on a dingy skylight
sounds dateless
more persistent than any feeling I have had
he’s conked out for hours as if he might have died
so instantly and quietly no one had taken note,
not even his son
“I’m new here and I don’t know where I am.”
dirty spoons in the kitchen sink,
“just put them under cold water and they will be all right”
mothers and fathers
with no one all night
no kind way to leave
“every moment in my life was luck”
gazing into my default motherly eyes
“slept in that front porch,” “the owls were a pine tree”
“at night they’d scare the devil out of me”
“Jack would let me sleep in his bedroom”
the father I miss can’t seem to die
the son must be the mother to his father
to see him out of the world
We were so close a week ago we couldn’t have been closer
the father crying: the door closes, his son
will never have been here
“I looked outside and everything was white just like
snow,
everything, all of those (azaleas),
“everything was like white. . . . ”
“Could it have been the
moon?”
“yes, some kind of light, but it was everywhere.”
night turns day inside out
no signs of any memory
does his face retain . . . or does no past at all
flitter there. . . .
it seems there never was
a past
strives in his little world of man to outscorn
the to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain
what kind of little world is this
is it anyone’s
“I had some . . .
you know, some soupy thing . . .
some oatmeal in a soup”
My name is lost says the son
my voice or my face
which will he remember last
“I made a mess”
“It’s always good to talk to you. I love hearing about you,
your creatures, and . . . your lovely wife”
“I am so ashamed . . .
“no, this isn’t right, to
be a burden on you and . . . . . . your brother”
“it’s beautiful and cold outside
and all I’m doing is lying in bed”
others’ beliefs, desires, intentions, feelings, thoughts
evaporate
and you can walk through yourself as if you were the wind
blowing you away, until you do blow away, endlessness blows away,
then even the wind blows away,
then voices, then faces without their familiars
then any wisdom
comes down to being old friends
with the rubble of statues in a bombed-out museum
why would I ask him if he remembers his age
it is like asking a river when will
it end
it is always ending
Fingerprints
Something is confounding about the open arms of winter trees: snow falls
straight to earth while their arms remain open. Seen through snow they
look sketched, grasping nothing. Of a night without end. Then suddenly there’s
sunlight. For once the shades are open. On his black desk-top screen
is a luminous anonymity of fingerprints. His. For 97 years, and shining, as
good as new. Beyond lost. They have a place. He will have left behind
enduring traces of brevity. He’s slowing down. There’s no getting around it,
even his slowing slows, so drastically that being seems not to be. We seem as
immobile as winter trees. As sleep. My father sleeps day and night away.
The predicament of time has compounded, he cannot adjust to how fast
everyone talks at him. No one stays long enough. For him to hear me, I
must pace my sentences. Snip them short even before their thoughts have
ended. Words that sound harrowed and in the same breath abandoned.
Covid 2023
Should I ask him if he knows my name? Or should I ask him if he
knows his name? “My pal is here.” Who exactly is this pal? What
am I? An indeterminate emotion. A flame. I think I go out for him
more often now. I both exist and do not exist. This has always
been the case. Neither of us could have known. On his face where
his lips might meet is a slit. It has a tilt now, as if at any moment
it could slide into something besides a smile or a frown. More like
a crack in an egg just before you peel the shell and the skin off. What
a worried look. He has to wake up and he doesn’t know if he can.
Mortal Watch
My father had forgot the mortal world. That world will die broken. It
shall not have the time to digest itself before it is incinerated. Its
afterlife shall be my wishing I could have done something other than
abetting in any fashion the endless forever-moment of his shame, when
in fact I had so little hand in anything. I’d fixate on my father’s broken
wrist watch. Broken for me but not for him. He would look at it all the
time. It wasn’t at all broken, he was. It had been right twice a day,
whereas he was never right. Then it too became never right. Its second
and minute and hour hands—stuck under the glass piece—broke off
from time itself. Big and little lightweight hands as thin as shed insect
wings. Hold the watch like a sea shell to your ear and shake it and you
can hear a faintest rattle. Time dies for my father before he dies. The
mortal world was also my world. A watch is mortal. A death watch is
a dead watch with no time to tell. Once time goes, so does timelessness.
Happiness
If all I’m hoping for is to outlast my own life
can anyone hear? Forget I ever asked,
but please believe there is happiness.
There are the good times.
Shall I model them in these poems?
I will not remember writing them
or worrying whether anyone remotely
like you will read them.
I saw behind your fear a shamelessness
came only at the cost of feeling shame.
The shameless times do, they do, they do
take care of themselves,
but happiness needs our help,
it needs to get some sleep
because it needs to vanish,
then it needs to wake and not to a miracle,
it is the part of the world of us
that takes care of everyone,
that is always looking out of itself
but we don’t know how
to look after happiness,
it isn’t ever going to alleviate our fear,
it is not looking backwards,
it is not about to solve
the past we no longer are and
we are the children of.
A Miniature of the Universe
The father was the last member of the family who knew and loved
its provenance, who could tell the stories I thought would be repeated
till the clouds fell out of the sky. Once he died my sense of family
fled to the other side of the moon to have its last breath in absolute
darkness. Or it dispersed as memories into the far regions of a
grieving consciousness. The rain is. Our family was. Yet when we
argued the universe argued. Our family was cosmic and epic and
apocalyptic. Our mother could not hold. Her sons loosed anarchic
slingshots upon trash cans and new windows of unfinished houses.
No one liked where we lived. It was a geography without an earth.
It still gets nowhere. Nowhere doesn’t hold: its constituent elements
break away, its blood ties unloosen their knots and strangleholds,
and gravity can’t stop its starlight from being lost for billions of years.
we meet/to part
Stars are look-alikes. They gash our skies in the same direction. They
blaze forever on the run. They are the choirs of white-hot plasma.
From a great distance they seem unchanging. As far as we ourselves
go, they go farther. In all directions goes their light. Up and down
have no meaning. And look how slow the speed of light is to confess
their deaths. Unbearably everything at their cores smashes together,
light is only a byproduct of that. They blink at night because they are
blinded by themselves. They turn off. With what you always said
death is. A flick of a switch. A light that comes out of itself only for
so long is what my memory of you is. I haven’t even thought to look
for your star. As you are farther away than they are. Wherever they
go they never get very far, look at them now, they don’t need to guide
us, they don’t need wings, “eternity’s for the dead.” You with flying
shoes on day and night, like a thought I’ll have for the rest of my life.
Their light is everywhere in the universe but mostly invisible. I will
not name a star after you. Light isn’t even what a star is. It is what a
star must reject. For all of my days may the light of you always return,
but your face I forget, proving that both Always and Never are endless.
