Two Poems by J.R. Solonche

THE GREETING

I hear it at the post office. I hear
it at the hardware store. I hear it
at the supermarket. “How’s it going?”
“Can’t complain.” A short sentence.
Fits in the pocket. Doesn’t require
batteries or a signature on a dotted line.
They don’t mean there’s nothing to
complain about. The roof has a small
leak above the hall closet. The left knee
makes a clicking sound on the stairs.
The gas bill went up fourteen dollars.
And, of course, there’s the politics.
But they look at the grass, which is
still green. They look at the neighbor’s
dog who hasn’t barked since noon.
They think of the alternative, which
involves a shovel or a hospital gown,
and they decide that the ledger balances
well enough. To complain would mean
opening a book too heavy to carry.
It would mean explaining the leak,
the knee, the fourteen dollars. Who
has the time to listen, anyway?
So they keep the phrase small not
because the world is perfect, but
because they are polite, or because
they’re superstitious, fearing that
to complain aloud is to invite worse.
It’s the smallest of treaties signed
between the ego and the afternoon.
It means the car started on the second
try. It means the coffee was hot enough.
It means nobody died since yesterday.
To say more would require unrolling
the long blueprint of disappointment,
and neither of us has the table space
for that kind of architecture. We nod,
the transaction finished, and we leave
the grief where it belongs—neatly folded,
at the bottom of the drawer.

*

LEAR

How many kings does it take to make a man?
Just one, it seems, without a coat, without
a crown, without his daughters, standing on
the heath in the rain. A man is a poor, bare,
forked animal, said the one with the fool
and the madness. The old man who has shed
his map, who has given away the borders,
the rivers, the dark forests, and has kept only
the crown of weeds, who did not know that
a kingdom is not made of land but of flattery.
Now the rain has no respect for royalty.
The lightning does not bow. The wind speaks
a language he should have learned long ago,
before the daughters grew large and the world
grew small. In the end, he is just an anatomy,
a bundle of wet wool and white hair, asking
a fool for the time, discovering that a man
without a title occupies exactly the same
amount of earth.

*

Nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, twice for the National Book Award and three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of more than 50 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.