Where have you been since the lockdown? I used to love your lightness and charm. Your optimism and hope. Where is my invitation to tea, my respite from grief. You always listened to my stillness, at least for a while.
You missed my son’s last steps. He couldn’t walk any farther on a bad heart, falling short of a bed just out of reach. A finish line at 35. Where were you, dear one?
I think of Zawinul calling your name three times on a Sunday morning, the choir hoping for forgiveness after Saturday night secrets. Their world will be all right come Monday. I hear only silence.
This is dead Wednesday morning, coffeeing months after Mom and covid reached an agreement at her bedside. No witnesses. No documents to sign. No one to hold her hand. Mom loved your reassuring voice. Where have you gone?
I stare through my window searching for you, but I see nothing. No you. No light. No kids playing games. I whisper, “Please.” A surrender, a loss, a ghost for a sister. There are mercy rules in baseball and carved bats made in woodshop. They don’t get used much anymore.
Leukemia is ruthless. Dialysis never ends. Monsters crouch in the corners of intensive care and wait for weakened prey. I wanted to show you Pat’s pastels, her use of color a revelation. We should have listened to Lawrence together. His tone a cross between Bird and Desmond, but you weren’t around. Now it’s too late.
There are rumors that you moved to Paris for the brie and Bordeaux, staying out all night and never getting up ’til noon. That doesn’t sound like the person I know. A friend of a friend thinks you’ve gone to Tibet to spend your days in meditation. A Bodhisattva in the making. I don’t know. I don’t know much anymore.
So, I’ll sit here and listen to Richter a while before I head off to the hospital again. I miss you, old friend. I just hope you don’t have cancer, too.
*
Roots of Gratitude
How did this thankfulness become a loss — a hopeful acorn falling through the night sky? Tell your long-dead mother that you always told the truth on Sundays but never any other day.
But that’s a lie, too.
When you pinch the cheeks of your curly-headed nephew, the caramel-skinned one-year-old, whisper to him that he needs to have his diaper changed just like you. We don’t stay potty trained forever.
Tell the family ghosts, the lonely ones, there isn’t anything new on the topside of this dirt. The leaves mirror the roots. The roots envy the leaves.
I’ve confessed to more than one tree.
How like my mother to sit under this birch and look down. How like my son to rise and peel the bark.
How human of me to wish for more.
*
2700 George Street
This is a charming Cape Cod built in 1920. A thousand square feet with 2 bedrooms, large enough for mom, dad, 2 tiny girls, and 3 active boys. All the children no older than 10. There is space enough for dreams.
There are no bathrooms in the home, but an outhouse, pumped, cleaned and newly painted, is situated near the back of the property and equipped with generous ventilation.
The eat-in kitchen is large enough for a galvanized tub and Saturday night baths. The oven can accommodate dozens of homemade rolls on Sundays and biscuits during the week.
Imagine a cozy living space, place where a 5-year-old hugs his mommy after her day of diapers, a wringer washer, and a yard full of clothes hung on lines in the sun.
This could be your life and the beginning of someone else’s.
*
Poet and publisher, Le Hinton, is the author of seven collections including, most recently, Elegies for an Empire (2023) and Sing Silence (2018), both from Iris G. Press. His work has been widely published and can be found in The Best American Poetry 2014, the Baltimore Review, the Skinny Poetry Journal, the Progressive Magazine, Little Patuxent Review, Pleiades, the Summerset Review, and elsewhere. His poems have received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and have been nominated for Best of the Net. His poem, “Epidemic,” won the Baltimore Review’s 2013 Winter Writers Contest. In 2014 it was honored by The Pennsylvania Center for the Book, and in 2021 it was featured on the WPSU program, “Poetry Moment.” His poem, “Our Ballpark,” can be found outside Clipper Magazine Stadium in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, incorporated into Derek Parker’s sculpture Common Thread.
