The Harried Life

 
 
 
Middle Age is an apex predator,
eats alive young-uns,
    leaves the remains.
 
I go to cemeteries to think
but rarely do it alone.
 
Holding hands, keeping pace
with our bodies,
 
happily married yet hunted—
we journey to the heart of a B-side
 
from a prehistory when singles were common.
You could hold them
   in your hands.
You could lower a
 
needle or press a PLAY button
to summon hallowed company.
 
At night she applies a special cream
to a blotch on her right cheekbone…ashamed
    because this is what aging
 
                 brought her.
Try to kiss that cheek, she’ll
swat you away.
 
Press PLAY.
We go to bed to be free of thinking,
others look on...
 

Story in Seven Letters

 

She will have the name of her ex-boyfriend tattooed above her privates. When she married the man, he became a husband, the husband displacing the boyfriend. Before then the boyfriend had done the same in kind. “A guy I’m dating” was left behind when the boyfriend arrived. She was in love, and a sign of her deep commitment was the name she had etched in ink above her pubis’ hairline. The foolish things people will do to eke permanency from a passing fad. The husband in turn eventually an ex-husband, the ex-husband then as well containing an ex-boyfriend, “guy I’m dating”, et cetera. The first man she slept with beyond that chain of relation asked after he’d gone down on her, “Who’s Rodrigo?” “Up until two minutes ago,” she told him, “you were.” After which she kissed and held him.

Fallmates

 
Modest in kind, headstones
remainders of two women.
 
            Attila Cox.
                    Bonnie Bristow.
Quiet and unsparing
in their loitering float
                                 through the years.
 
Graves here in Cave Hill
when I was born
      and unbeknownst
as I scattered from Limerick
     to Henderson, Cleveland
 
          to Cincinnati, Lexington,
              Charlottesville, Chicago…
Forty-seven when I find them,
 
They’ve aged not a whit.
 
Surely neither knew the other,
their plots a quarter mile apart
 
brought together by an afternoon walk.
I stop to jot them in a notebook,
    resurrectionless
          again as what
 
               parents and marriages
                     called them.
Attila Bristow. Bonnie Cox.
Names to mix and match.
In a story I’ll surely
 
   abandon in draftage,
they’ll be characters, main
   or minor, doesn’t matter.
Combinations of two lifespans
 
extending beyond their mortal reach
tapping my shoulder
 
for the turn and the look, not to thank me.
           

Theory of Illness

English is cruel because it’s language so it has to be, a jealous shadow of the world and its conflagrations. The last few days of summer its cruelty gains further definition, this time while I read Peter and Jean Medawar’s Philosophical Dictionary of Biology. In the entry for “Illness”, among a lengthy list of ailments, there’s mention of cretinism, which develops, they note, from chronic thyroid deficiency. What I copy here they wrote out before me, out of pity and a curious resentment: “There is, incidentally, an element of charity in describing these last victims as cretins, for ‘cretin’ comes from the French chrétien, meaning Christian. ‘The implication of this word,’ according to lexicographer C.T. Onions, ‘is that these beings are human, although dwarfed and deformed.’” The implication of all utterances: these beings were human, though words we have devised to describe them are dwarfed and deforming. As they are, they are imperfect and whole. This I suppose sounds less like science and more like religion. Its believers are rarely well-spoken.