Novel in the Making
The story is short, and not very novel.
A man and a woman,
both brisk as cloud breaks:
The woman is not bad, but sometimes sloppy.
The man is not bad, but sometimes sloppy.
The man constantly reminds the woman of what she lacks,
which is the same thing that he lacks,
and they are constant in constantly doing this.
Till one day the woman just tires out,
the way a clock stops ticking after a spring has rusted.
And the woman stops listening,
and the man stops talking.
The space they share is silence.
No tick, no tock,
And they learn how to feel lonely,
Together.
Triste
There’s something sad about a daffodil on a windowsill in February.
The miracle of the blossom against grey panes,
the brazen orange mouth that speaks in wide O’s,
when I am still living in backdrop
of winter sounds, uncertain what each patter
and rasp might be.
The roll of wind against shutters.
Glasses shifting in a rack.
The dog scratching at its chain.
Not yet ready for this bulbous shout of color on a sill,
or the comfort of my own loneliness yawning wide and loud.
One Night a Bear
pawed through our garbage tins,
jostled our refuse,
it stuck a dank tongue
into an empty pint of cherry vanilla,
knowing what brought it to that moment of sweetness—
a watermelon rind, cobs of corn,
the crusts of bread obsessively carved from squared edges.
All that could have sustained us,
was but a flicker in the unburdened appetite of a bear.
The bear could see our faces pressed in awe against the pane,
eyeing a still life of trash strewn over the lawn
revealed in crescent moonlight.
The next morning we packed,
traced veins on maps,
budgeted our solitary destinations
for places other than the unchartered terrain of heart.
Memories of that night,
summers and summers ago,
are fettered to a moment in a rented cabin.
The only thing not muted to our past
is a bear--come one night
when we were hungry,
but could only watch it feed
on all we had tossed away.
Smiling Fish
My son at the age of three asked:
Do fish smile?
Where does the blue go when the sky turns grey?
Why do I have to sleep alone if you don’t?
He never turned from my exasperations,
muted answers, or the continuous folding
of whatever it was in my hands,
keeping them from being empty.
Now, grown and the product of unanswerable queries,
he says that I am the one with too many questions,
demanding details, the fine tuning
of sound bytes, wanting, in every minutia,
the story without any revision,
becoming the constant north
in memory’s daily compass.
All of our rejoins are just remakes
of questions he stopped asking,
now that I have all the answers.
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