THE HANDSHAKE OF A LITTLE GIRL
Shaking hands
with the left hand is awkward
and upside down.
I lift my right hand with the left
just below the elbow
and deploy
the handshake of a little girl,
the grip of which
makes any egg safe.
July 14, 2016
STILL SINGING A STORY
I watch with shaky patience
as my body slides into decline.
Hands turning into a weak network of bones,
veins like struggling blue worms.
Skin as thin and fragile
as the rotten lace attic curtains
at Grandmother’s house.
Throat beginning to feel like
it is lined with sandpaper
studded with glass shards
retaining a whole language
while still singing a story.
August 3, 2016
JON BALES, SATURDAY MORNING,
ON THE WAY TO THE HOSPITAL
You were strapped to the gurney
and rolled out of the house one last time.
Rounding the bend in the sidewalk
too fast you were almost thrown
onto the ground.
When I touched your hand
under the wool blanket
you were as warm as the side
of a stove.
You were so thin
that I couldn’t picture
you at a time when you were not.
On this, your next to last day,
you were yourself as you gestured
me closer to your lips to softly form out
the last words, appropriately a joke,
that you would ever speak to me.
August 3, 2016
THE BOYS
Visiting an old friend,
in his late 70’s,
at the VA Hospital,
who will live the rest of his life
in Building Number 27,
the nursing home section
of the hospital,
sharing his room with two other men.
He told me the stories
that he had told me before.
The one about landing
on Omaha Beach.
The one about fighting
in Battle of The Bulge
and being one of only fifty
survivors in his company.
It was an old man’s curiosity
the way he kept referring
to the men in the hospital
as The Boys.
Men with blank stares.
Men with bald heads.
Men with limbs cut away.
Men slouching in wheel chairs
as The Boys.
August 5, 2016
QUIET NEGLECT (THE EL SALVADOR PRAYER)
Often the distance
between two lies
is too close.
We can only concern ourselves
with just so much anyway,
and then, we must return to a point
of quiet neglect.
It is the way we do things.
It is our awakening
to the way things can become:
The sound of distant rhythms,
the cannon of continued destruction,
the smoke from different kinds of rice fields,
a shorter distance to cross
than there was before.
Priests scream Hail Marys,
children just scream,
and Cathedrals sit like the stones they are.
Whores bargain fast and cheap.
Bombs have a way of breaking dates and faith.
July 30, 1983
–Louis Zoeller Bickett