We Say by Reginald Gibbons
I got this one from I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You. The next couple weeks are going to be a bit hectic and I’m considering a PotD hiatus. We will see. I don’t like not posting, but it’s quite difficult when my time is not my own.
We Say
By Reginald Gibbons
We say a heart breaks—like
a stick, maybe, or a bottle
or a wave. But it seems, too,
like the consuming flame
of a moment, the field clump
that crackles upward from a match
and collapses, grass filaments
glowing in the ash-dust
then going out. Today
I take myself down by steps,
one at a time, into the sadness
I admit I can’t always reach.
There should be a room
at the bottom of the black stairway,
my friends sitting with strangers,
waiting, but there’s no one,
only the memory, when
the pale air flickers as if
it were an invisible flame,
of my aunt in her hospital bed
and beside her, about to be left
alone—the last sister, and so soon—
my mother, bent over
the purse in her lap, eyes closed.
I can see the patent leather gloss
and the shiny clasp that until
just now she had been
snapping open and shut, till—
just now—it broke. That breaking—
like a voice that cracks, cursing
or crying, or the song that falls,
out of thinking too far ahead,
into a smoldering loneliness—
was that the sound of the heart?
