Why We Cry
A poem
Mr. Laing was a distant, working neighbor
Long ago, the snow was so deep
His Metropolitan muffled like an egg
Or a hibernating big, lumpy animal
Here’s a rule: Time cannot go backwards.
It can only advance.
Here’s the loophole:
Time can proceed at different speeds.
Martha Laing hit me in the head with a rock.
The scar is still there, easily seen if I were bald.
Scalp wounds bleed copiously.
Mrs. Laing died of lung cancer.
Their Dalmatian slides down the hill
On his supper bowl. They filmed it.
“See?” They watched it over and over.
Sometimes, things happen.
People wander off, suddenly busy.
A two-year-old dies in an accident
Or from a disease.
We forget names over time.
“I think it was Kim, or Lynn”
Our mother only remembers
Whose fault it was.
“They let her play outside when she had Chicken Pox”
They moved to Barre with that ancient car.
And he worked in the Rock of Ages quarry
His time making memorials and gravestones
For all those people.
Now I am eleven years old.
“Want to see how they cut Granite?”
They run long loops of thick wire rope
Over the surface of the rock
Dragging it over the same spot in the face endlessly
Until finally, after time,
A big slice falls to the loaders.
When my dog was two
She was chasing a stick
And ran into the fence and died.
She was down and still
I had no time to help her
And tell her that she was a good dog.
It was the same day as the Super Bowl
And the Timekeepers kept having
To set the clock back
Two seconds here, five seconds there.
The stadium full of people, all ages.
I remember the sound
How little the sound was
Of the grinding wires
Just a whispering sound
And Mr. Laing held my hand
To keep me from the edge.
· Revision of the poem first published Jan 2003 in Eclectica Magazine.
