Cicada
Cracks, crevices, and holes disgorge
Insects by the trillions, a dizzying horde
Clicking so quickly, their tymbals abuzz
All to find love, reproduce, and then
Die
Abandoned exoskeletons, shift and sigh
Spring, thy lovely face
Looks upon us all the way
Guide us to summer
What eight year-old kid
Uses “thy” in a poem?
Me, apparently.
You sit bundled and layered
despite the summer heat,
the heavy blanket
covering you,
chilled and addled
by chemo,
dozing off, head slumped
on your chest, waiting
to feel better, to have
enough energy, enough breath
to climb a flight of stairs.
And I sit, sweating, and watching you,
wondering what food I should order
from Applebee’s
to celebrate our anniversary,
which likely will be
our last together.
Do we have the power to redeem or is forgive the best we can do
And if so, can one do it to oneself
And if one is trying to redeem oneself
From a life of crime, say
Where comes the courage. Without it
How else would one ever do what is neccesary
The apologies the confessions the belittlement
The admissions even to oneself
Even further from what corner of my cell would courage crawl
Very few of us here are dimwitted they are put somewhere else
Many of us can catch a fly in the hand pierce a heart with a toothbrush
Ruck a fake if that’s all we can find but we can’t find the courage
He lives in the pit of my stomach,
this long-dead avatar of my real father,
whose residue still murmurs.
He haunts every new project,
hanging over me like smoke after fireworks,
to choke a boy no longer small
who waited ‘til the night before the essay was due,
or the poster or the book report.
“You’re cutting close, aren’t you?
My father was at our family store well before opening
before the customers,
and stuck around past closing if any remained—
(the memorable Sunday afternoon
when someone came in at closing
time with a box full of those vacuum
tubes to power a 1960s TV,
to check them out on our “U-TEST-EM” machine,
a supposed moneymaker my father
had installed in our little convenience
deli. We had to wait ‘til he was done).
He was a good dad, I hasten to add,
but his shade hovers diligent
in the doorway of my imagination.
I’m told to tolerate him,
to negotiate, cajole, bargain,
to tell him where to go–
but he springs from love
and it endures.
You touch my hands
because you have to.
The precision is essential,
and I’m a fumbling novice.
Your expert manipulation makes the chord sound nearly perfectly
so
close
But even more it makes me breathless…
Pulse like a metronome
Brain humming like the vibrating strings
under my fingers
under yours
Your breath in my hair as you circle behind to take my other hand
suddenly clumsy as a child’s.
You say I need to be louder, more forceful
I know
I shouldn’t
A whole life relies on
me keeping this quiet.
One more drink
Then I’ll jump in the ocean
Swim the Australian crawl
all the way to myself
In an annex of the white house at 25 Bardwell Street
in Lewiston, Maine, Mrs. Hirshler and her students
sat catty-corner while reading aloud from Les Faux-
Monnayeurs or La Divinia Commedia, she in her light
German accent, pausing to eat her diamond-shaped lemon
or almond cookies–fresh from the oven–sipping lapsang
souchong, and to watch squirrels under the birdfeeder.
Never nostalgic for the pediatric practice she left to escape
the Nazis, a widow, eighty, she napped on the Greyhound
going to visit Einstein’s daughter or her sons. One of her
sons found written on a scrap of paper in her phone book:
“Let the merciful interpretation of all things
be the main concern of our life.”
At first I felt bad
when they pummeled my windshield,
a hundred red-eyed
lives I never meant to take
reduced to guts splashed on glass.
At the pool today,
kids in swimsuits shrieked and plunged
beneath the surface,
shook off small winged assailants
buzzing blindly at their heads.
I watched one sputter
on the water, no longer
caring if it died.
But a man reached in and plucked
it out – better man than I.
