The Bluestone Review 2020

The Bluestone Review 2020

Poetry

Too late for clean sheets, I will work tonight instead. I rise into the walker, and feel through my arms the thump across the floor. Time was, I’d strain my ears for the cries and quarrels of downstairs neighbors; now all voices are downstairs neighbors. I will not see the morning of such a gray night. I take the red pen. I remember before computers the White-Out turning to dust in my hands. In the beginning I even took handwritten papers. Handwriting. That was my secret skill. Keyboards made excuses. Go on, I’d say, Middlemarch was written with a feather. It was those dumb, frightened faces I hated most, the vanishing unconsciousness flowing into my words. Sitting across from me I would swear they opened their lips soundlessly, just to vex me. Where do they all go when their names and faces are gone? Years, and I think all that lives is in a filing cabinet. They come to me sometimes. I pretend to remember and sometimes do. Once an abandoned building held a lone apartment. I don’t know how they came in, or how my back came to be broken. As they struggled to greet me I missed the menace outside, the collapsing windows, the pursuing gallop, the frightening and unidentifiable weapons. Or how did they come to be in that room? That cave really, at the top of the Pacific Coast Highway, my nephew’s bedroom thirty years before? I’ve known that room many nights, full of sweaters, letters, scarves, even term papers. This time it held music—every song in the world at once, but separate, distinct. That’s not how I hear their papers, all pouring into one another, the meaningless phrases, the repetition, the stolen internet words. I shake my head like an old Basset Hound. What did you want to say? I thought I asked kindly into their cringing. Go away, I told my niece, this desk is the Emergency Room. I don’t know how I learned the names of these strange gyrations they perform, dancing silently to no music. They mock one another, pretend gladness at my presence. I hear laughter as the elevator closes. I don’t know why they all work in that restaurant that closed years ago, or why they all climb into cars and drive away. I stand alone in the parking lot amid the broken glass. I lift my head and go on circling grammatical errors. Every word I’ve read before. My nephew is gone; I stretch out on the orange-covered single bed and inhale the boy deeply, without shame. They are all singing now. They are singing melodies, their young mouths shaping pure sound. I lie there asking, where are the words? There are no words, they say: And I rise.

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