Lisa Verigin
For Grace Who Calls from Jersey to See
How Her House and I Have Been Getting Along
My bare feet love the sand-hued smooth of your floors
as my skin loves the morning deluge of light and the kiss
of afternoon remnants. I’m lapsed quick back to Used-To.
What I mean is, I have lived before in someplaces like yours.
And the old, dear glass; the 1924 Queen of the Highway
who coyly but knowingly stares through her frame and down
at me as I brush my teeth and fix my hair each morning;
the square-cut rocker perched in its corner—
shards of the more distant past—these keep me linked
to the ghosts I keep in my own today home where sun
skirts the morning and fills the spaces of my afternoons,
where carpet cushions the crush of my feet.
My body likes how it moves through your house,
as though it were the only life in a curious diorama
in a deep museum where I study myself in this scene
which seems at once gone and familiar and new.
My body is learning to like it. At night, it’s sometimes
even agreed to let go its hold on my knotted soul.
Released, it untangles and, soaring like a sigh, ventures
into the culture of stickum stars littering your ceiling,
following their spiral into the roof’s severe peak.
Sometimes it even believes in the black hole hovering there,
from which all stars seep, around which they whip and whirl,
believes it can crawl through to find all it may have missed.
Quitting
Cousin Babs and I stand in muggy, overcast July,
outside this convalescent home on the Sandhills’ edge.
Dragging in long ribbons of smoke, we’re rapt
in the silence that becomes blood relations who seldom meet.
Inside, Aunt A sits all day in the air-conditioned
silence of some pretty dream the staff doesn’t want her to keep.
She liked it when I told her, “Yes, the snow outside’s
very deep—chest-high, at least. The boys’ll be shoveling for hours.”
Then everyone told her she was wrong—that it was
summer both inside and out—and made her say her name three times.
Now I remember why I smoke: it’s an easy get-me-out-of-here,
ditching empty talk or talk that is full of rough fingers pressing one’s sore spots.
It’s a way of leaving that mutes the true whys of leaving.
Most of those who’ve died on me died young. For once, I’m glad.
Babs thanks me for sharing this smoke with her,
asks me how things are going back at the university in Lincoln.
We look at the sky and I mutter, Usual, busy, but good.
Got one “dead grandpa paper” from a student that was actually interesting.
Now I remember why I smoke: it’s a way
of remembering, of going out with the dying, of clinging to what’s gone.
Babs says we should get back inside, and I wonder
how I will ever explain all this snow: how it looks, how fresh it smells.
I smash the hell of the cherry. Smoke spools off,
an ethereal dancer gyrating toward heaven.
Lisa Verigin's poetry has appeared in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Poet
Lore, and American Literary Review, and most recently in Hardpan and Talking River. She
currently lives in California's Central Valley.
Home
Issue Two
For Grace Who Calls from Jersey to See
How Her House and I Have Been Getting Along
My bare feet love the sand-hued smooth of your floors
as my skin loves the morning deluge of light and the kiss
of afternoon remnants. I’m lapsed quick back to Used-To.
What I mean is, I have lived before in someplaces like yours.
And the old, dear glass; the 1924 Queen of the Highway
who coyly but knowingly stares through her frame and down
at me as I brush my teeth and fix my hair each morning;
the square-cut rocker perched in its corner—
shards of the more distant past—these keep me linked
to the ghosts I keep in my own today home where sun
skirts the morning and fills the spaces of my afternoons,
where carpet cushions the crush of my feet.
My body likes how it moves through your house,
as though it were the only life in a curious diorama
in a deep museum where I study myself in this scene
which seems at once gone and familiar and new.
My body is learning to like it. At night, it’s sometimes
even agreed to let go its hold on my knotted soul.
Released, it untangles and, soaring like a sigh, ventures
into the culture of stickum stars littering your ceiling,
following their spiral into the roof’s severe peak.
Sometimes it even believes in the black hole hovering there,
from which all stars seep, around which they whip and whirl,
believes it can crawl through to find all it may have missed.
Quitting
Cousin Babs and I stand in muggy, overcast July,
outside this convalescent home on the Sandhills’ edge.
Dragging in long ribbons of smoke, we’re rapt
in the silence that becomes blood relations who seldom meet.
Inside, Aunt A sits all day in the air-conditioned
silence of some pretty dream the staff doesn’t want her to keep.
She liked it when I told her, “Yes, the snow outside’s
very deep—chest-high, at least. The boys’ll be shoveling for hours.”
Then everyone told her she was wrong—that it was
summer both inside and out—and made her say her name three times.
Now I remember why I smoke: it’s an easy get-me-out-of-here,
ditching empty talk or talk that is full of rough fingers pressing one’s sore spots.
It’s a way of leaving that mutes the true whys of leaving.
Most of those who’ve died on me died young. For once, I’m glad.
Babs thanks me for sharing this smoke with her,
asks me how things are going back at the university in Lincoln.
We look at the sky and I mutter, Usual, busy, but good.
Got one “dead grandpa paper” from a student that was actually interesting.
Now I remember why I smoke: it’s a way
of remembering, of going out with the dying, of clinging to what’s gone.
Babs says we should get back inside, and I wonder
how I will ever explain all this snow: how it looks, how fresh it smells.
I smash the hell of the cherry. Smoke spools off,
an ethereal dancer gyrating toward heaven.
Lisa Verigin's poetry has appeared in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Poet
Lore, and American Literary Review, and most recently in Hardpan and Talking River. She
currently lives in California's Central Valley.
Home
Issue Two
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Chickenpinata
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| issue two |
