The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Marjorie Stelmach

Kindness

1. 
A woman turns a page of her novel and stares at nothing
for a long while, as you do when a story is over.

Her book will lie closed on the bedside table when
later that same afternoon they find her.

Her daughter and son will live on in that town
with a father who keeps her secret—a kindness.

From him, they will learn to say they have “lost
their mother.” Their father, too, will be lost to them,

brushed with sadness. And so they’ll grow older
with no one to ask.

They will wait twenty years to ask each other.

2.
Across the street, in habitual silence, a boy is practicing drums—
his father has not come down, though it’s nearly noon.
 
The boy holds the beats in his head. He’s perfecting the art
of halting the sticks just before touching the drum skin. 

He loves the brushes most of all, how they feel to his wrist—
those soft figure eights, loves how lightly the sticks rest

in his fingers and on the heels of his palms, as he strikes
the taut cushion of air just barely above the surface.

He feels himself gaining a mastery—knows when he parts
the curtain of silence he’ll stop their hearts.

He is learning kindness.

3. 
A century turns.

On the outskirts of town in the eldercare center,
a woman brushes her thin gray hair.

She has inched her wheel chair closer all morning
to the light in the East. It’s arduous work.

By the time she reaches the window, the sun has climbed too high
to spread on her shoulders that warmth she remembers.

She brushes and brushes. By ten, her hair is shining and ready
to braid on the porch in the sunshine, but where is her mother?

By four, she begins to whisper, “Help me,” over and over
until someone hears and steers her to dinner, where someone

removes the brush from her lap—but always it’s back
on her bedside table when the sun comes

over the sill to wake her.

4.
Down the hall, a woman leans hard on the wheels
of her transport chair, steering it toward the closed door

of a sunroom, but no one’s able to help her just now.
As she waits, she remembers a place she loved as a child,

its slant of light, its cushion of straw under her feet and the smell
of horses. Someone’s large hands have lifted a saddle

up and away, have draped a blanket on a wooden divider,
are taking a curry brush down from a wall-hook.

It’s good to push hard with both hands, to feel
those larger hands covering hers, guiding her strokes.

She shivers in pleasure at the way the flesh ripples
low on the horse’s flanks: this is her horse, only hers.

This horse loves her. 
   
5.
In a storefront church on a downtown street, the boy
who mastered the half-inch halt sits in a wooden folding chair

on the stage where he plays his drums each Sunday.
Whether he’s brushing the underside of the choir’s

tight harmony of petitions or scourging a flat-out strut
for an Easter procession, he finds himself smiling.

He’s survived a few close brushes with faith and knows
he will come again and again in this life within range

of God’s love, never quite touching—a kindness.

 6. 
The brother and sister still live in that town where they long ago
learned their father’s secret. Together, they keep it.

The boy, nearing old age himself, works in an eldercare center,
tending its systems, mending what’s broken, attending

to minor needs: gently he straightens their pillows, returns
lost belongings, adjusts the blinds. Some of the residents tell him

they’re ready to leave now. He listens in silence. Sometimes
he nods. He spends his breaks in a numbered room down the hall

where he reads to his sister. Some days she knows him.


Eclogue for Summer’s End

Because the one who loves never knows what he loves   
Neither does he know why he loves, or what loving is . . .

—Fernando Pessoa
    The Keeper of Sheep