National Poetry Month 2014: nothing ever lures them back into their gestures, the flesh we remember
Cutting Bait
by Rhina P. Espaillat
The trouble with the dead is how we need them
to play themselves for us, to keep us warm
in the curve of their being, as if they shared
the sun with us, wore our seasons like gloves.
Aching with absence, we tug at their deaths
to hold them: how one bright old man forgot
our names, but quavered Puccini; another
dwindled between the sheets to sixty pounds
of paper bones and nerves and skin like glass;
and one bought roadside fruit for a sick friend
until a downhill truck with failed brakes found
her, dragged her spinning from the axle,
scattering peaches.
But they need to step
clear of us now; they send out mosses
and lichens to cover their human names,
they untangle themselves from our hunger,
our lame grief. We bring them children, poems,
but nothing ever lures them back into their
gestures, the flesh we remember.
From Landscapes with Women: Four American Poets,
Singular Speech Press, © 1999
by Rhina P. Espaillat
The trouble with the dead is how we need them
to play themselves for us, to keep us warm
in the curve of their being, as if they shared
the sun with us, wore our seasons like gloves.
Aching with absence, we tug at their deaths
to hold them: how one bright old man forgot
our names, but quavered Puccini; another
dwindled between the sheets to sixty pounds
of paper bones and nerves and skin like glass;
and one bought roadside fruit for a sick friend
until a downhill truck with failed brakes found
her, dragged her spinning from the axle,
scattering peaches.
But they need to step
clear of us now; they send out mosses
and lichens to cover their human names,
they untangle themselves from our hunger,
our lame grief. We bring them children, poems,
but nothing ever lures them back into their
gestures, the flesh we remember.
From Landscapes with Women: Four American Poets,
Singular Speech Press, © 1999