The readings are over. It’s time to weep.
A funeral passed me, you know, last evening,
I was by the pharmacy, a little procession of men behind the man carrying the little dead body in his bare arms,
air packed, shut tight, in a sack.
your life.
I am unable to shake the image out of my mind,
poets! I offer you my mediocre disquiet of bystanding.
There’s a prerogative in standing by the sidelines, watching.
I can’t let you be in a bubble!
You must change
In the shower, when the sun’s breaking in brightly
through the skylight & the water’s incessant upon you,
stare blankly at the dazing blue, you stare at that floodlit blue!
Later on, sit, let that sea of sad eat you whole,
you feed that god! don’t cry yet, don’t break yet,
torso of Apollo, caught in laughter,
deliver us!
- in response to Dermott Hayes' April prompt in Lit Up, Distraction.
- title after Ilya Kaminsky’s poem, A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck.
- the first two lines in italics are from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, Archaic Torso of Apollo (trans. Stephen Mitchell).
