by JS Gilbert
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?
What’s one more dish to clean,
spill to wipe, errand to run?
Another ache, another
twinge, another throb? If bad
things come in threes then you’ve
stopped counting, which God tried
to tell Job but Job had other
things on his mind like flaming
sheep and absconded camels, not
to mention his son’s leaky roof.
And this was before ultrasounds
and MRIs and sinister masses, so
what else should we expect except
mounting, increasingly specific
woes?
What’s one more dish to clean,
spill to wipe, errand to run?
Another ache, another
twinge, another throb? If bad
things come in threes then you’ve
stopped counting, which God tried
to tell Job but Job had other
things on his mind like flaming
sheep and absconded camels, not
to mention his son’s leaky roof.
And this was before ultrasounds
and MRIs and sinister masses, so
what else should we expect except
mounting, increasingly specific
woes?
when in a moment
of inattention your
most precious and richly
stained coffee mug falls shattered
to the floor it knows only
that it is broken
and cannot cry
but desperately
wishes it could
There are few opening lines more pretentious than
‘I have a hot tub’—maybe ‘I don’t own a TV’ or
‘I read The Economist’—but it’s true and anyway
it’s for my wife’s fibromyalgia and it was on sale
and there’s no other way to explain the leaves that
become trapped and float unnoticed to the surface
sink beneath the jets lost in the flotsom to wind
between our toes and lay at the bottom of this
chemical bath dying as we relax color fading like
an astronaut without oxygen who can’t keep her
eyes open as the warnings flash 15 10 5 3 percent
red through her eyelids but she’s long since succumbed
to an isolated slumber and slipped down to death to
wind between God’s toes, a leaf in the filter but
he still knows her name.
I cannot draw
but I did
my best to gild
the functional canvas of
his
field-trip lunch sacks
with apple trees and
iron gates and
atoms and books.
(It was the only way
I could be
there and anyway
PB&J
is boring enough.)
The truth wasn’t,
though.
Needed neither apples nor atoms
to make it
any more
there
but we can’t help
ourselves with
such scintillating sin.
(We save our
sharpest
crayons for the
cleanest
lines of our
deepest
fears.)
Still
I wanted to draw
that Sunday,
as someone stood
in your stead,
the way you were:
hands raised in blessing
bouncing on your feet
so willing to
love
us and me and them and
him
as God so
loved
the world
with, surely, angels
at your side and behind
and around.
But I could only
see a darkness
billow from
organ pipes
to claim your shadow,
sneak from
under choir robes
wrap your wrists
(again)
in chains and
the laughter couldn’t’ve
been yours because you
were screaming
as its claws sunk beneath
your soul.
So instead
I wept
because I have such trouble
drawing hands.
In memory of Anthony Lamar Smith.
I.
Patterns are important.
They trained us to use stickers
stuck to name tags to create
stucked mosaics of remembering
that I was they were we had been stuck
together.
The un-unstuckable promise of future stuckiness.
II.
I am the
Friday Man the
Story Man the
Teller Man
with the
books and the
bag and the
voice of bears in my chest.
I am the
unconditioner the
constant visitor the
indescriminate huggerer.
I am (also) the
White.
III.
A favorite is The Monster at the End of This Book
when they’re eager to look beyond This Page despite
Grover’s growing fear and rage at their strength and
power, and fervor to see the next and reach the end.
Laughter in the face of danger.
They squeal when I ask if they’re sure, should I
turn, do we dare, is it safe, aren’t you scared?
No! They are brave, they don’t care, it’s a story and
a show and I am there to protect them.
And, anyway, monsters aren’t really real.
IV.
I can’t understand
a word he says but
that doesn’t stop him
talking from the moment
I enter the classroom,
throughout each book.
As the others fidget
in a bulbous line
waiting
for their stickers
I see his hand slide
into my peripheral
(as I’ve slid into his)
to grab a sheet of Minions with guitars,
soon
followed by a finger pressed carefully
onto my shoulder so
the sticker will be stuck, and
never leave.
V.
The verdict wasn’t surprising but
the tears were unexpected because
this, too, has become
a pattern that won’t unstuck.
Injustice that never leaves,
pressed too long along
the peripheral of they who judge.
And he is brave and he is bold
which is, now, met with joy
because this boy has been told
(and believes)
that
I will protect
him.
But, dear God,
how real are these monsters?
How close, with every page?
I screamed
when I first saw him,
a bounding black cloud
thundering toward my horizon:
a boy looking for a friend.
He stayed with us
until that day
I had to stack the shelves and sweep the floors,
direct customers to the canned
whole chickens in aisle five
while They did whatever it is They do
to friends who once escaped the yard
to find
me at school during recess and
the principal let me walk him home but
who can’t walk anywhere anymore.
So, I get it.
But when my son’s eyes are red-rimmed and
welling with rage at yet one more
failure / betrayal / Talk
with a father trying too hard
because
he knows what’s coming demands more than
paper-or-plastic or expired milk or stray carts and
his son bears the brunt of that fear until
their ties twist taut and love becomes
a strained and brittle mask,
please forgive my snicker at your dog-parent sticker.
I.
Strange, to say that a mother
has
‘lost’
her baby.
That such a wonder could be mis
-placed; such a love,
so careless.
It implies guilt and fault,
a moment
of inattention in
a moment
when there is anything
but.
Though who dares? Who brave or soulless
enough to speak the actual words that
A.
Child.
Has.
Died.
To name the thing? Give face to the fear;
voice to the dark?
Except the curse has fallen
without having been spoken.
A breathless and wordless strike.
No word, no breath,
could have or did have
stopped it,
despite our most loquacious prayers
which, in the end, were nameless.
II.
This loss runs contrary
to expectations
that our children
(a child)
are
(is)
innocent and inviolately safe because
we are there, inviolating.
For surely Joseph, just a man,
just a father,
was tense in his stabled vigil,
keeping watch of the sheep and ass and cattle
for signs of sudden movement.
Hooves behind this line because
this child is mine.
Son of God, yes; yet, too, Son of Joseph.
(Who was told the name, but
was he who gave it.)
Sent to protect but, first,
to be im/perfectly protected.
Our protection, in the end, is never enough.
III.
As, in less than a moment, did God speak
the Word,
so did your soul-spark catch and flame;
soft and sublime.
A light where there had been none.
As, in that un-moment, all that was/is/will be
flowered and filled Creation,
so did you expand and collide in measured beats
to become.
And so are you conserved.
Neither created nor destroyed,
neither present nor absent.
What has been named cannot be unnamed.
What dreamed, unseen.
What loved, in the end,
lost.
