It Wasn’t Death That Surprised Me
it was the room afterward
the refrigerator humming like a priest
too tired to finish the prayer
his mother folding inward at the kitchen table
I remember the wallpaper
little yellow flowers
I remember wanting to leave
America was outside breathing gasoline
snowbanks blackened with exhaust
dogs barking at nothing visible
television glowing blue in every house
like a portable afterlife
and I
young, selfish, frightened animal
could only feel my own breath
hammering against the bars of my body
I did not love him correctly
that’s what I mean to confess
I made a cathedral out of my own confusion
lit candles to my escape routes
mistook distance for intelligence
mistook numbness for survival
the adults spoke softly in hallways
coffee burned for hours in the pot
someone touched my shoulder
and I hated them for it
years later
I hold my own children in the dark sometimes
after nightmares
their hair smelling of soap and sleep
and I finally understand
how grief enters a parent
not like weather
not like philosophy
but like an axe through the front door
now I forgive the boy I was
thin-blooded and wandering
dragging his loneliness through every room
like a broken suitcase
still
I know how quickly I disappear from pain
I know the instinct to turn inward
like an animal licking its wounds
while the world burns beyond the cave mouth
so I practice staying
I practice listening
when another person speaks from the bottom of themselves
I practice not making sorrow into autobiography
I practice holding still
because the world is breaking everywhere now
coyotes scream beyond the subdivisions
like damned souls chewing through chain-link fences
I’ve heard them at night
that wet ecstatic violence
bones splitting open under the moonlight
the old religion of hunger
and I stand at the glass
feeling my own animal answer back
no line divides us from them
except a window
a paycheck
a name we keep repeating to ourselves
I Think Now of Shelters
cellars lined with jars of radishes
dust gathering on the glass
someone years ago believing enough in the future
to preserve sweetness underground
that’s what poems are for
not decoration
not vanity
not mirrors confirming we exist
like Eugene O’Neill staring into his own exhausted face
before another drink, another play, another lonely applause
no
poems are provisions
a hidden cupboard of language
for the famine ahead
Because One Day the Screens May All Go Black
the servers silent as abandoned churches
the paper burned
the wires stripped from the walls by desperate men
and still
someone will need to say
I was here
I loved you
the world was terrible and beautiful
I did not understand how to stay
but I tried
If every pen disappeared
I would write your name in ashes
if the oceans swallowed the coastline
I would kneel in the wet sand
all sweetness haunted by fire
all youth vanishing while you swallow it
After Love
sometimes silence settles over two bodies
the way oak leaves settle on black water
without argument
without theology
only the soft animal fact
of having briefly touched another soul
and mirrors
God, I hate mirrors
still I look
still I straighten my collar
like a man preparing to meet himself
at the edge of extinction
I look because I want proof
not beauty
not youth
just proof
proof that the frightened boy beside the deathbed
grew older
proof that sorrow can ripen into mercy
proof that somewhere beneath all this American noise—
sirens, highways, advertisements, gunfire, election signs,
the endless machinery of appetite
a human heart
still struggles
to remain open
and the world, despite everything
goes on breathing through us
wild, broken
unforgivably alive
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image: George Payne
