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This Matters
The broken vein in my wrist
has turned brown.
The upright piano at the Star Lounge
is missing a key.
“Pretend none of this matters,”
I tell the woman in the backseat,
her face salted brown,
who gripes that food stamps don’t apply
to her Boston Terriers.
She’s maybe fifty, hitching a ride
to the river bottom.
That We May Not Vanish
I dream of Judy Levy in Jerusalem,
where we met after 43 years.
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
— John Keats
We sit by a grandfather clock
that rests on nothing.
Gold-plated Roman numerals
cast no shadow, and the hands of time
are still. Our breathing
steams the cold air of absence,
but when we try to speak
our voices turn into echoing chimes:
What will become of us?
What will become of us?
Your glance is as steady as ever,
and the contours of your body
cling to metal on wood—relics, tiny ruins—
what we find to hold onto in the dark.
Reaching for you, I bump into a wall,
slippery as obsidian, and you’re gone.
Are you only lost to me, or are you stuck?
I lurch upwards to grasp a memory
not yet extinct: the Calvert Review
with lines from your translation of a poem
that continues to live in me
despite the lost years. I ask you if it’s true,
what Amichai wrote, speaking of a child:
“And the powerful spell See you soon,
which he’s learned to say,
works only among the dead.”
I must have knocked you off the ledge
while scrambling up before I fell.
Why didn’t you scream? Yes,
I know that’s not your way. Or mine.
What good to chafe against the darkness?
And now, like children, we rise into giggles
on the other side of time,
where we don’t have to be too stiff for life,
or fashionable, and surprise, surprise,
it’s not too late to bake the bread of yearning.
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