Eric Keenaghan
Life must do
the forgetting.
It’s beyond
us to own
up to need,
yet we do
such talking
to subject
it as if
it were all
ours to do
the living.
As if it
were up
to us to
relinquish
what is not:
loving,
forgetfully.
The Letter Penned on a Bus My Husband
Used to Ride
Platitudinarian
heat,
control—
facsimiled,
worn
near blue:
if only every man were just
or with just that much
control.
But not so, no more.
I had scribbled truisms
on calendars. Now I use
dates only to mark
occasions. One oblong
drupe put in a box
hung an inch or two
below the sill
per young man
parched, lost, policing
arid spaces. Ten
started to sprout
Wednesday. One
immediately bent
over toeing the line
with an errant root
pointing outward at the
mute crack in shadow
where fortune would
freedom decircinate.
Hundreds lie fallow.
For every woman
laid low beside,
between two quartz
rises, a stone
furrowed
to catch and draw
the water for
their crystallized
blood inside.
* * *
What’s
primary
in
this now across
from
the sprouting
page
its
memorial
leaves
is
him, thrumming
his
heart-
strings,
mimicking
the
slap
of
an internal bass.
He
embodies the public
and
taps
the unlistened-to
decree.
This half-extinguished twinkle of a man
the one with lunatic
eyes.
A bird skitters by.
He fashions a cup
out of his fingers
so the impact
will re-
sound.
Prophetic note
of a tit amplified.
This
inescapable issue
of control,
of filling
space,
of moving
so west
you’ve come back
home.
On all fours,
we
crawl left
down
Central.
That’s
when
I
was wrenched
by
the directive
from
a little girl
reciting
the law:
“Invent a missing
people you must
make them
come.”
Antigone’s
still beating
his
melons, bemoaning
Creon’s
crime. The choric
function
has come to stand
in
for the man, the act.
Even
when my brothers
are
buried the jackals
sated
since the pretender
never
comes
to
hold his dearest
son’s
head, never to claim
it
“mine.”
But your tongue
used
to intone ordinances
on
my backside
molars,
further than where
toothbrushes
reach,
used
to give words
not
mine to spill over
the
sand, a sending,
a
message to make stones
grow.
Your code is
the
great unwritten,
the
great unshakeable,
the
closest I had
to
a homecoming
when you were
absent and rotting
in my brothers’ sun.
Now
there’s just
the
empty beat
of
an unheated
upstate
bus, irregular compositions
on
municipal timetables, discarded
periodicals
about the permanence
of
sway.
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