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FOR WHOM NO SORROW ANSWERS
As the season’s quarter moon illuminates
the cemetery stack of tree and stone,
Easter is a barren prayer.
I’ve watched you drinking sick at Carnival Bogota,
watched age slip your face
with softened jawline,
the crease high on cheekbone and temple.
I’ve seen motherhood’s mark on beast and belly,
seen the bitterness return to your serving son’s eyes.
There is no mention of failure in your house.
You deny two children nothing.
A third child squanders every favor,
laughs and loses at equal turns.
“It’s mathematics, simple math,” you reason.
“One child will be bullied
as payback for a life disrupted.”
I hung seven couplets in sequence
and formed a seal redolent of ash and soured wine.
Though we never speak of your illness
as either chance or choice
every conversation swings on eight questions
tied to the minute of the hour.
I no longer reminisce.
Memories are fables without morals
WHAT I KNOW OF WEARINESS
Suicide is the moon driving the longitude of an ocean sky,
driving the logic of a burnished, failing sky.
I'm not allowed to buy you flowers,
to strike your name as a lover.
Robins and sparrows flutter the garden areas on your street.
Crows skip warily along the wires.
I start the day from a balcony chair,
tracking the mailman's morning route,
the diagonals, the sun-stroked lines
of Mediterranean, Colonial, ragged four-plex.
Single motherhood takes its toll
alternate holidays, every other weekend.
Friday into Saturday morning is my allotted time.
Other nights bring other men.
Behind me
you're naked, spread-eagled
in the master bedroom where you fell,
Polaroids on the table by the wine.
You are not the first I've seen
market disdain with
a vivid, indecorous dying.
I don't mind watching.
THE STORM ROAD
Pick any icy day:
note the adversarial weather watch
muddy melting patches, the sinister glisten of the grass
a careful half-step at a crosswalk, the braking sliding driver
echoed crackle of children's voices
arid glaze of light pooling between house, tree and yard
layers of creaking leaves in gutters
beeches stained by bladed sleeting winds
a crumpled sky angled at steeple, tenement, factory
Pick any icy day
— R. T. Castleberry
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