Poetry By
Cheryl Wilder
Published on: 7/15/2010
Disconnected
The answering machine light remains solid, the empty side of my bed is full of new pillows. It is almost midnight and I sit at the kitchen table folding a math book closed, my homework tucked in-between like a tongue wilted against the lower lip. My son has kicked off his sheet so I lift his pillow-soft legs but as I cover him he walks over the sheet, the slightest touch draws this reaction. I press my cheek against his forehead, listen to his breath and kiss him. In the house there is the dishwasher and silence, two sounds that cradle me through nights since his father finally left. I circle through rooms before bed and think of school and work and preschool and bills and cleaning and laundry. When I hear a sound my ears perk but it's never the phone, I turned that off months ago after listening to his voice follow me through the house, trying, with a mere pause and shift in tone, to get back inside my heart.
Published on: 7/15/2010
Muse
It seems the journey has not been easy for you, either. You return shaking lint off tattered wings, and have also lost your lyre. I wonder why you had left me to suffer alone, dipping ink from my veins instead of yours. What I don't tell you, while I suture your wings with these modest words, is that I was afraid you'd arrive and I wouldn't know how to snip the stitches of sorrow that held me together. I had waited for your melody to unbind my mortal heart. And now you're ready to leave again, yet do not tell me where you plan to go. As I place my ear to your chest and memorize your heartbeat, clouds amass and churn in our silence. Wind sings around us because we are in its way.
Published on: 7/15/2010
Spring Cleaning in Winter
I help her throw away two-year-old sour cream, the nearly empty cleaning products, two, three, no, six bottles under the sink, congealed drippings, scent of pine and winter evening rain. Unopened mail, paper clips, rubber bands; places to sit dwindled among jackets, throw bags, outdated coupons, a small unused photo album. I step over cat toys, divvy out items into various rooms, close her bathroom door for another day. This is not the first door I have closed, there have been many -- the musty smell of youth seeps through the cracks; dirt and grime from skinned knees on my bike, the wind I would ride down the hill, a freedom I wouldn't know what to do with, what it meant. I close doors to preserve, to know I can, to know doors exist, that transition happens, that it will happen to me. I look at the bathroom door -- to me it is a portal, the only place where I feel the tactile presence of my body, the softening curves in my hips, the marks where my son grew inside me. I trace my calves and thighs, the rough dry skin, the years of track, of running in the dark, of becoming a woman. I have no need to cover the perishing of my body. I open the bathroom door again, look in the mirror as I did fifteen years ago and reveal myself through the pandemonium. And this is where I want to be, this place of knowing middle age, not a thing of the future, not a happening to someone else. I see her through the doorway, in the other room, the matted hair, the bathrobe, the way she stuffs mail in the over-stuffed holder; I see her mornings in the piles of towels on the linoleum. It's what we do, watch a loved one live in the luggage of their sadness. I put another pill bottle in a basket and close the door.
Published on: 7/15/2010
Any Good Reason
It took all my effort at first but after time became who I am, this wanting to ignore the depth of pain and just find a plateau. At my hearing when Mike's father stated to the court how I did the work of the devil, the stenographer never looked up, D - E - V - I - L. Do accidents happen to you, or do you cause accidents? While having lunch with a friend I searched for reasons why Mike was in a coma. He said people seek religion after trauma to answer why; we finished our conversation in silence. I've never come up with reasons, only a crisp awareness of timing-- the alcohol in my blood, a sharp left curve, the shimmering rain--kind of like the atomic bomb and how the newly invented air-conditioner cooled the lab until something clicked and energy leapt through the veins of a moment stopping time with one loud crash.
|