Month: December 2017

Poem of the Week 12/12/17

Arthur Russell

The Heavier Stone

My dad died eight years ago.
Our relationship has improved a lot since then.
He arrives unannounced in my poems,
driving his maroon Lincoln Town Car,
bearing odd gifts – like a ten-pack of paper towels —
plays with the baby, leaves before dinner.

I hope my mother’s death earlier this year
will put us on a similar trajectory.
I’m not asking to be reconciled.
That would require a deeper well or a heavier stone,

but possibly, now she’s dead, she’ll stop interrupting
when I explain how an answering machine works,
and also be nicer to my wife.

Her refugee belongings huddle
in the dust-bunny corners of my home,
as if they, not I, had been orphaned,
and reminisce about her orderly closets,
her straightened twist ties and the pens
that weren’t tossed aside simply because they didn’t work.

I’ve never done well with actual people.
After cartoons and pen pals,
it was girlfriends in distant cities,
then poetry, the ultimate girlfriend in a distant city.

I hear my daughter and her friends
laughing in the living room.
That is the correct distance between me and joy.

Some people jump up and wave,
or run along the station platform;
others dream of the wind.

She told me that I couldn’t go to little league that day.
I slipped out, anyway, still crying in my uniform, with stirrup socks,
my oiled baseball glove on my hand,
and tried to walk to the game.

By the time I reached Marine Parkway,
the angry tears and snot had dried,
and I was enjoying my brigand walk
past the lawns, the stores and intersections
of our usual car route,
when she stopped across the street
and rolled down the window of her Bonneville,

and her face appeared in that trapezoid of missing glass.

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Poem of the Week 12/5/17

Nasreen Khan

Indiana

You moved us here the day before
my birthday. We packed up the kid and the cat
and the milk crates of secondhand books and cardboard boxes of anemic houseplants
and said goodbye

to the cramped one-bedroom we choose for its drafty sunroom
where we made our baby, and where he slept bundled under the greenhouse panes
in the pale January sun.

We said goodbye to the nagging, constant thrumming
that maybe we’d make it, and maybe we’d have enough someday to
do more than walk hand-in-hand past the New York City shops
in their Christmastime trimmings,

and goodbye to the church where we were married and goodbye to the friends hard-won
in the spaces between the North Jersey hustle, goodbye to the mossy wall on Park Avenue
that my fingers loved, goodbye to the people we had wanted to become here.
Goodbye.

Here,
where I see cracking plaster walls and a muddy Midwestern sky,
you see a future and an inheritance you can leave me, a backyard to
teach your son to ride his bike,
a sandbox to build, a tire swing to hang, a garden to dig for me.

You were so pleased to bring me home,
you would have carried me over the threshold
if I hadn’t been sobbing. Instead,
you laid me down on the camping mattress on the dirty floor to stroke my hair
and said what you’ve always said,
“We’ll make it, we’ll make it babe, you’ll see”.

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