I feel you now
sure as the dense rinded February sun
feels the silent knights and gleaming kings of Cleveland
gentling her loins in today’s cold thaw,
my roiling chassis pocketing Loraine Carneige change,
so many diamonds in your dust.
And once your girded steel is sheathed in rocks and mortar
who will see me, rust and ashes packed in shadow,
concrete overshoes the size of skies?
Beyond this gilded game
caught in winter’s trance
our chain of waters pearl
lies dormant as our minds.
I wonder why, in passing,
all the standing market handlers
never threw their voices or their rice
or manicotti lemon peppered scrod
in our direction, back when one kind word on either side
of summer’s twisted river might have saved us from our bashful scorching pride.
Thoughts like these now spend my dwindling cache of useful doubt,
never quite surmounting futile steps of mourning I have trod
these months since our departure.
Emboldened fingers almost reach the numbers on a phone that holds
the unerased remembrances you spoke to me at Christmastime
when hearts do strange unlikely unembarrassed wheelings
only childhood suffers well.
Pride incumbent pulls my hand away
from all the grains of yesterday
sifting through the narrowness of now,
pointed as the shards of try
bearing up the C-town sky
today and in the morning
when you wake.
Susan Weber