Last Time

II
After some finality, after finishing breakfast, after you are busy with your stories, yourself, you love you, when I am silent and you are left to solo activity, you primp, you convince yourself I am still in the same room.

Last of the Crises

I

There is some peaceful, personal, active thing I think less and less about, but am followed around and crowded in by.

If I promise to visit, to wear a helmet or a warm coat or a warm loaf of bread, then?

If I promise to find out that fullness, to float up and bloat and bob because of it?

If I fan out the flames, to foment, to do to do to do, ta da!

I see you making faces. I catch you spread out across town, and not a bit too thin nor none too soon. I anticipate every necessary adjustment, every necessary inch of you, every glottal stop, every down and out.

Whisper me back to life and where no one else is or let in, leave it all that much more space.

Room

In the belly of a bellow,

just past the halfway mark of winter,

our coughs and colds are less than daylong

and the heaving beast,

with whistling lungs,

with buckling, splintered legs

and shinier shoe polish camouflage,

creaks to a topple

to a wail of an out of tune crash of

too many voices.

Middle C is now Low D

and all the chords

are majorly mine,

piled in a puddle of cooling ivory,

stalling over sticky smudges,

popped knuckles rusted in place,

gracelessly getting to the next measure,

catching on to catching up,

off beat or rhythm, off key, out of tune,

out of time and town.

The dust alone dries out my voice,

and I cannot sing from the hoarseness

in a chorus, sing

in the absence

of Great Uncle Accompanist.

How did we get this knee deep

in scores, in piles of laundry and picture frames,

in the teeter tottering of imbalanced benches?

How did we get through the front door,

dead weight, wood, ivory, and Allah,

to suck up the space of a perfectly useful dining room

just to close the French doors behind us?