Two Poems by Len Roberts

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)