I have no training in poetry, nor do I read much of it. I don't think about it much, or have strong feelings about good or bad poetry. But once in a while, a poem will decide it exists, and choose me as its amanuensis.
He lost his wife two years ago. He told me twice in ten minutes.
His kids want him to get rid of her clothes, but--
with everything else, being fired was the straw that broke the camel's back, you see.
A star's mass in the volume of a sentence
A life adrift, cut from its mooring
and spinning, puzzled, through space and time.
Sucks getting old, he said.
Better than the alternative, I said, or so they say.
My wife died two years ago, and I gotta tell ya
Better than the alternative, I don't know, ha-ha.
I have never had a wife.
I have a partner, a boyfriend, occasionally a spouse
(or a husband if I need to borrow a cup of conventionality).
A constant presence in my mental, emotional, and moral landscape
I am a compass pointing always to magnetic north.
Someone told him recently that we're obsessed with each other,
which is true.
I fear that every day, I said.
I'm sorry.
My own electromagnetic reversal looms,
ready to upend every sense,
unpredictable as a plume exploding into blackness from the face of the sun,
when nothing will be familiar
and I will use the wrong words
to tell people how lost I am.
There was nothing the law could do for him,
this aged man with a sputtering heart
and a hole in every waking hour.
He hadn't wanted to detail cars in the snow, you see.
So reluctantly I sent him tumbling on, alone.
I hope that the other laws held, though
that the intangible temporal echo of loss between us--
my anticipatory past, his regretful future--
altered his trajectory as much as mine
in an equal and opposite reaction.
Once--
I don't remember when, probably last year--
I felt a memory crumble.
I remember thinking
that I must remember what it felt like.
My mind is less like a sieve than a hoop
scraps of butterfly net fluttering at its rim
clinging on principle rather than tenacity.
Usually I only notice that another shred of my life is gone when ctrl+f shows 0/0 results.
But I'd found one in flight last year--and just barely rescued a little slip from flying beyond reach
A nimble pinch!
In the breeze, with intangible fingertips.
I felt so proud, for a moment.
But as I started to admire its insubstance
of where, what, who, when
(A field, a hug, a friend! a warmth!)
The shape of the memory distorted.
I had only time enough to register the impending disintegration
And fling up the blanket of time once more to peek and glimpse the singular little lump
before it pulsed, deformed, wriggled like a starfish in a pouch,
and crumbled
this thing that was me.
Of course, I don't remember what I don't remember, now.
I may instead have witnessed the creatures that line up the seconds, tick after tick after tick
or the Rube Goldberg machine behind the world that makes causality cascade down twisting cages like ball bearings.
The creatures are tired
The steel balls are dented
Keep it behind the curtain, please?
Spare me the memory of decay, at least.