The Disappearing Trick
You’ve
vanished again, somehow
moved
from the seventeenth row,
thirteenth
stone in from the road,
snowflakes
blown horizontal
across
the wide sweep of the dead
while
I stumble in cold feet,
cold
hands hanging onto the plastic wreath
I
intend to clamp to your grave
and
tie secure with the thin green threads,
but
you’re nowhere to be found, gone,
just
as you’d drifted out that black door
on
Olmstead Street into twenty below,
jacket
open, no hat, no gloves,
only
khaki pants and white socks
glimmering
above cheap boots
that
let any weather in,
only
the house of cards left trembling
on the kitchen table
beneath
that dim moon of a bulb,
the
star-speckled linoleum gleaming
as
it creaked, me turning in a circle
as
though you were hiding behind me—
expecting
the sudden tap on the shoulder,
the
sudden hand-brush through my hair—
not
believing anyone with such rings and keys
and jangling coins
could
so quickly, so silently, disappear.
My mother catalogues the
wrongs
the world’s done her,
the
cake her parents ate
while
she and her eight brothers
and sisters went hungry,
the
long nights in St. John’s Alley
where
the man knocked on the door
of her fifteen years,
so
many months spent looking out
windows, afraid
to
leave the house, afraid to buy
a
tomato, a cucumber at Rosa’s,
afraid
to light a candle in
St. Bernard’s Church.
The
Alzheimer’s that runs in her family,
her
sister Verda, then Dorothy, then
Eleanor and Joey,
and
she knows she’s next as she forgets
the roast beef in the oven,
stumbles
over my name, my brother’s, tells
me he’s got a bald patch
in
the back of his head just like her father’s,
tells
me the man who has been dead thirty years
helped
her clean the cupboard last night,
that
he polished the glasses with his breath
the way he used to,
clattered
the forks, knives, and spoons
into the tray
while
the radio played Your cheating heart
will tell on you,
the
shadow of the woman with the red dress
flickering across my mother’s eyes,
but
before she can speak, the image is gone.
Mother, I say, lie down, get comfortable,
and
she tells me she doesn’t belong
in a hospital,
making
me tell her she’s not even as she
looks
around
and
asks what all the women in white
are doing here,
why
do they come in at night and wake her
for pills,
where’s
Peppy, her dog, where’s her purse,
my
mother’s face ten again, waiting for
the belt, the walk
to
school with no winter coat, kneeling
on
the thick, green carpet and saying,
God, it’s cold, please
wrap me up,
asking
me, her father, her doctor, her son
to
take her hand and hold it a moment,
Not
to let go, Not to let go.
Len Roberts is the
author of nine books of poetry: Cohoes Theater, Momentum Press,
1980; From the Dark, SUNY Press, 1984; Sweet Ones, Milkweed
Editions, 1988; Black Wings, Persea, 1989; Dangerous Angels, Copper
Beech Press, 1993; Counting the Black Angels, University of Illinois
Press, 1994; The Trouble-Making Finch, University of Illinois Press,
1998; The Silent Singer: New and Selected Poems, University of Illinois
Press, 2001; The Disappearing Trick, University of Illinois Press, 2007;
Translations: The Selected Poems
of Sándor Csoóri, Copper Canyon Press, 1992; Before and After the Fall:
New Poems by Sándor Csoóri, BOA Editions, Ltd., 2004…
His
poems have been published in various periodicals such as Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly
Review, Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, Antaeus, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner,
American Scholar, and many others.
Len Roberts (March 13, 1947 - May 25, 2007)
