Someone's old parents in the desert on folding chairs, one cradling his face, the other absorbed, a Jew with blue eyes and a Jew with brown, and inside, behind a huge plateglass window, a modern dining area, black and white high-tech kitchen, swivel stools, a lot of counter space, and their daughter basting a turkey with orange sauce. The father has only this morning confessed his wife's secret -- something he never tells her he knows, though he assumes she knows her father -- who would be near 100 now -- never died when she was two, but abandoned his daughters and wife and gave Florence and Rachel -- lifted from the Bible -- the gift of the public trial of early sorrow, which each wore far from her nature like a boxed jewel that escapes down the throat and illumines the heart, as the throbbing of the cosmos is lit by what preceded it. The man in the chair, whose leg won't work when he gets up, has accepted his wife's anger as depression and forgiven her, turning down the light like an orchard lamp, low and steady, for fifty years. I know them, I have bothered to inhabit every maneuver until they shrivel and I am sky that darkens over them -- these creatures in the yard, fallen like lizards into a pool without water, gesticulating and blinking, wiry, slow, whom I let slowly go into a house, settle in front of the console and press the remote to each memory station -- pause, hold, mute, flash. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE BLACK MONKEY by KATHERINE MANSFIELD A DEATH SONG by PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR A CHRISTMAS CAROL by GEORGE WITHER HARVARD DECLARES WAR by BRENT DOW ALLINSON HATED by LOUISA SARAH BEVINGTON A WOMAN'S SONNETS: 5 by WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING by FLORENCE ESTELLE BRYANT THE WANDERER: 2. IN FRANCE: MADAME LA MARQUISE by EDWARD ROBERT BULWER-LYTTON |