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Torn Photographs Once each year, I wander near your grave. Washed gray by fog, just sitting there like stones to turn. I pick a cold day to match my left feet with the shame of the awkward waltz, with the ice on my skin refusing to lift. It has to be a quiet hour where tricot clouds smother the copper sun. A day with gusty, raspy wind to exercise this loneliness. When someone says I have your grin, I look in the mirror, see breadcrumbs scattered on teeth, chew with the dentures of wish, lament the loaf I never met. All my photographs are torn, so I bind you in useless mirage. Convincing myself we would have been a hardbound book. I look for Father's footprints there -- spy nothing but the untouched emerald grass, a slippery squirrel of bolting weakness running up the rotted tree. A diner of life closed by death. Answers to our missingness -- like bathing whales in soup tureens. We were the cleft lip that never sang. That sign in his foreign eyes banging against the tenuous glass, forbidding the entry of dangerous love, brittle now as unwrapped Swiss. In polyester poetry, I speculate on cashmere breast. How silence can metastisize. I'd beg him to open the wound, pick at the carcass of grief, but you are an orange with too many seeds.  |
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