The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by David Lee Garrison
On a Line by Thomas Lynch
Life goes on. The dead are everywhere.
They make the floorboards creak like ships at sea, they wink from glistening streetlights here and there.
They read the book we’re reading, touch our hair.
They walk beside us though we cannot see
or hear their steps. They constantly declare
themselves in letters we have saved. We stare
at those who favor them. The cypress trees protect their souls like nesting birds. They are
not “in a better place,” they’re here. In air,
in water, earth, and fire. The timpani of life beats on in death. This world is where
they linger, waiting for us. Say a prayer
for the dead, that they may always be around us, with us, in us, in the flare
of memories so we do not despair.
They make their way across the river, we
can only see them off. We’re in their care as life goes on. The dead are everywhere. Mink
Martha trailed behind her parents, who made a grand entrance at family gatherings, waving to everyone like politicians. Pushing forty, she was fading deep into their shadows: her parents talked too much but Martha rarely said a word.
I wondered why she never married
or brought a man around. There was a man, my mother told me. Her parents disapproved of him. When he proposed, they begged her to turn him down, offered her a mink as a bribe. She took the coat and no man asked again.
After she inherited, Martha began
to suspect the motives of men, even those she barely knew. She believed male interest in her sprang not from who she was but what she had. She quit her accounting job and moved out to the lake.
Her body hidden in shapeless dresses,
Martha would come to our house at Christmas and hand my mother a bottle of French champagne. I would help her off with her coat and hang it in the hall closet, sweeping several others aside to give it room, to let it breathe. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |