The Day After Everything is Cliché by Dick Westheimer

The Day After Everything is Cliché

There’s a crow on the road
on the way to the poetry workshop
and I think I will be completely consumed
by cliché today, eaten by guilt, green
with envy of those who wear certainty
like a cloak of invincibility, sure the Earth
is flat and that immigrants eat cats—
those wearers of red hats and flyers
of giant white flags, my neighbor perhaps,
whose daughter, K—whose brother asked
so many questions that the only answer
was to point an AK at his own head and shoot—
will soon wed. Her dad and I walk each day, talk
about his tumor, how he read on the web
about a baking soda cure. He’s poured
a hundred boxes of Arm and Hammer
into his hot tub and turned up the temp
to a hundred and six and I’m convinced
that this will work, if by “work” I mean
he will die happy if only because the man
K marries is good to her, volunteers
at the VA helping old men bathe.
And what good would it be to my neighbor
to know that the Earth is a ball,
that the warming world will burn
us all, that the man whose flag he flies
would never volunteer at the VA, that crows
remember faces and bear grudges?
Nothing I could say will shrink his tumor
or be grandpa to K’s kids when he’s gone.

*

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have appeared in Only Poems, Whale Road Review, Rattle, Gasmius, and Minyan. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig. More at www.dickwestheimer.com