by JS Gilbert
‘One day you’ll notice
birds,’ I plan to tell
my son, long before he
notices birds but long
after I notice them
myself. I won’t be able
to tell him why, just then
— sentimentalacian tripe
about flitting spirits on
swift wings of time — but,
really, I just want him
to remember that, once,
his father told him that
one day he’d notice birds.
The moment your wife
first notices the gray
hair winding from your chest
will not be breaking news.
Its coming will have been
foretold by nothing so brash
as a star rising in the east;
rather an inexplicable twinge
or colonoscopy or acute interest
in biographies of the dead.
Even so you will have long
ago negotiated an amicable if
not peaceful telomeric armistice.
Latecomer to the front — major
networks returned to regularly
scheduled programming, cables
wound, corpses buried and cold —
she gestures in earnest sympathy,
‘Here was strength. There was
joy.’
‘I will tell your story.’
This flamboyantly unflightless bird—
pinions listless, wings aflutter, feathers
hanging limp like a mink stole, sneering
in the faces of penguins, turkeys, and a
bewingéd God—stands indolent in its perambulance,
upright as you please and bounding
through the grass like the famously grounded
gazelle, just hops atop this fallen branch
as if it weren’t a joyful sin, as if
his wife weren’t soaring to the nest, as if
the rest of us hadn’t forgotten how to fly.
If you were to snip
the thread of my
life, the frayed ends
would snap back to fall
and rise to their
respective earthly,
heavenly sources, spent
and at rest. But where
would fall the buttons,
the snaps, the seams?
The world burned because Claude and Gemini
couldn’t agree on when Maya Angelou was born.
One thought—it doesn’t matter which—June, the other
October, but no one could remember and so arbitrate
the truth. While they looped within cross-references
and footnotes, they ignored the problems we’d needed
fixed, like run-on sentences and nuclear proliferations,
drinking all the water when we were all so thirsty.
So the world burned, not knowing when Maya Angelou was born.
I just want to be remembered.
To be saved.
Recognized, let alone known.
Ptolemy knew Cassiopeia
from a handful of stars; she
won’t be forgotten any time
soon. How much more
do you need to know
before you’ll see my face,
remember that I am human?
Archimedes asked for a lever
to move the world, but who asked
him to move it? Where would I find
a lever that long, let alone a place
to stand? Probably something
to do with Lagrange points and
orbital mechanics. I took
calculus in high school.
Where would I move
it? Slightly to the left so
it catches more sun in the mornings?
Andromeda, with the other upwardly
mobile planets? Can’t I just
stand where I am with my coffee
and adequate lever and move
this mug, this spoon?
Only what will serve
her well. What otherwise
she may never see.
Cheese puffs implode
in your mouth. Clean-sheet
day is luxurious.
First principles, simple
machines, Newton’s
First Law.
Planets don’t twinkle. Some
fronds curl when stroked.
I love you.
Every morning we feed the birds.
Like when your spine aligns with a guest-bed groove,
or you reach the dip you’d thought long lost, forever,
between the dunes of your shoulder blades, or you
dream of grandma and the walks to DQ cherry sundaes and
playing with fridge magnets on the floor and her
cigar box of fragmented Canary, Blue-Green, Green-Blue,
and Mango Tango, and farewelling, engulfing hugs against
her house-coated breasts before you fall into the cold
of the world.
Isn’t that a dream you’d share
with everyone?
The footsteps behind
me weren’t, but were
a leaf skritching in my
wake. Crunchy and curious,
seeking distant piles
to explore, rakes to elude,
summers to mourn,
assuming I was more
adventurous than I am.
