EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING AGAIN
At
Admitting you gave me back
your wedding ring. I keep it
in my coin purse, dread
losing it when I pay
the bus driver. And the days
relapse:
Enter and
Do Not
Enter on glass doors; messages
choking voicemail at home; stale
news wrinkling the waiting rooms;
elevators climbing the green
glass tower that hides its heart
behind a hard shine, pumps
hooked up to you drowsing
exhausted. Even the view
from the bed is the same,
except the trees are turning.
PEELING OFF THE LAYERS
My deceitful poems are papering
her over, hiding her from all ofyou.
How she yanked the electric
blanket to her side; had to have
the last word about money, where
to plant the rhubarb; gave advice
in triplicate; collected catalogs:
Land's End, Hold Everything... piled
them hamper-deep. How she ordered
things. Another go-round with Gevalia
coffee, another clutch of panti-hose.
Her singing always drifted slightly
flat. She disliked concerts after dark;
shied from small talk with strangers
at cocktail parties; hated the movies
and TV. Until she stopped, I didn't
even guess that her red plastic glass
was always filled with bourbon.
THROWING OUT HER THINGS
Bag after bag I fill, pressing out the air. The slick
black plastic clings, suffocating the heels and toes
of many shoes, the silver buttons on a boiled
wool jacket, a down bathrobe's puffy bulge.
I tie the bags shut, carry them down the steps,
throw them over the tailgate of the Subaru,
a dark mountain of next-to-new blocking
the rear-view mirror. I'm cleaning as if moving
into a place I have never been, but it is where
a red-faced man in a striped tie rang the doorbell
at two a.m. I couldn't help watching him unmake
the bottom sheet and wrap her in it, spread
a maroon plastic bag by her on the bed, lift her
on top of it, feet first, then shoulders, zip it
up, heave it like a sack of roots onto the guerney
and strap it tight. I helped him roll it bouncing
down the steps, load it into the black car's
blacker yawn, the wet night empty, three a.m.
I stood in the rain until nothing shone.
Allen P. West lives in a retirement home somewhere in the Boston-Cambridge area. He was the chemistry professor who lived across the street from me when I was a kid. His wife Emily died of ovarian cancer in 1999, shortly after he retired. The poems I've probably violated all sorts of publishing rights by posting here are from his chapbook,
The Time of Ripe Figs (and don't worry, I left the best of the poems in the chapbook). It can be purchased for a remarkably small amount of money by visiting the people at
White Eagle Cofffee Store Press.