LITMIR.BIZ

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once the news is out, thrown over

      your shoulders like a threadbare robe,

      you move on cold feet room to room,

      feeling as weightless as a soul,

      turning on every light in the house,

      needing the light all around you

      because it’s a new day now, though still

      in darkness, hours before dawn,

      a day you’ll learn to call that day,

      the first morning after it happened.

Swinging from Parents

      The child walks between her father and mother,

      holding their hands. She makes the shape of the y

      at the end of infancy, and lifts her feet

      the way the y pulls up its feet, and swings

      like the v in love, between an o and an e

      who are strong and steady and as far as she knows

      will be there to swing from forever. Sometimes

      her father, using his free hand, points to something

      and says its name, the way the arm of the r

      points into the future at the end of father.

      Or the r at the end of forever. It’s that forever

      the child puts her trust in, lifting her knees,

      swinging her feet out over the world.

Potatoes

      On a misty, sepia-and-green

      May morning, crossing Iowa,

      I saw from the highway

      a man, a woman, and a horse

      out sowing seed potatoes,

      using a two-wheeled planter

      from a hundred years ago,

      the man beneath a straw hat,

      holding the horse’s reins

      and taking a sight on the posts

      at the end of the field,

      the woman perched behind,

      above the tin potato bin,

      watching the steel disc roll along

      and fold the earth back under.

      The horse was brown as varnish

      as it pulled us forward, all

      of us, with black clay dropping

      from its shoes, and I was

      never surer of the world.

At Arby’s, at Noon

      Some of us were arriving, hungry,

      impatient, while others had eaten

      and were leaving, bidding goodbye

      to our friends, and among us

      stood a pretty young woman, blind,

      her perfect fingers interwoven

      about the top of her cane,

      and she was bending forward,

      open eyed, to find the knotted lips

      of a man whose disfigured face

      had been assembled out of scars

      and who was leaving, hurrying off,

      and though their kiss was brief

      and askew and awkwardly pursed,

      we all received it with a kind of

      wonder, and kept it on our lips

      through the afternoon.

A Meeting after Many Years

      Our words were a few colorful leaves

      afloat on a very old silence,

      the kind with a terrifying undertow,

      and we stood right at its edge,

      wrapping ourselves in our own arms

      because of the chill, and with old voices

      called back and forth across all those years

      until we could bear it no longer,

      and turned from each other,

      and walked away into our countries.

The Rollerblader

      I saw her coming from a long way off,

      that singular, side-to-side, whisk-broom movement

      as she swung her arms and legs, brushing

      the morning and its inertia aside,

      and the dew which throughout the cool night

      had settled on the path like starlight.

      An old man and woman, too, with their little dog,

      were swept off into the grass, lifting their knees,

      and they glanced at her hot red face as she passed,

      as if they’d known her once, and all that fury.

In a Gift Shop

      Only in recent years have I begun

      to notice them living among us,

      and yesterday there were two more,

      the one somewhere in her seventies

      and in a wheelchair, and the other

      younger by maybe twenty years,

      helping the older woman pick out cards

      from one of those squeaky revolving

      racks in a shop. The older would gesture

      with a weak brush of her hand to tell

      the younger to turn the rack a little

      and the younger would turn it, and both

      would study the cards from the top

      to the bottom, and once in a while

      the younger would take a card down

      and show it to the other, holding it

      closed and then open, and the older

      might nod to agree that it seemed

      the right choice, or she might dismiss it

      with a shake of her head with its thin

      white hair, and the younger would

      patiently put it back, and this went on

      for what seemed a very long while

      Конец

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