To Be Heard
Awake tonight again, risen from a place
I looked for someone in, and who was it
I’ve now forgotten, but the body’s left in
an urgent state of search without an object.
So I’m just about as in the dark
as some mad kid with a gun, he grips it
hidden in his pocket—he’s got no clue
who it is he needs to drive a bullet through.
I do remember wandering the alleyways
between the rows of houses, the concrete’s
long cracks venting up the under-night
to a music like dust pouring over itself.
I’d hear my name called as if from close
behind. It was a gust or a truck’s lurch
out on City Line. I’d turn and find no one
there but the world’s ruptured eardrum.
Gavel
A question, a when, in that train-coach-narrow
living room, at our creaky dining room
table, in our tiny galley kitchen—
a when again, in those quiets between
our mother’s eruptions. We knew there would be
another tearing at love’s strained tendons,
but no words for it on any tongue’s tip—
no, tongues held in our dread’s silencing
grip. As though we were caught in a hard surf’s
rush—sure we could drown if
we opened our mouths too much. So we wouldn’t
inhale deep, not even to sing
the trouble’s name, if we knew it. Which wouldn’t
save us. It was about safety but not
about Russian missiles aimed from that island
outlined on the nightly news. Deathly sleeping
sickness mosquitoes might pass? The polio
licked off a friend’s red popsicle? No,
there’d be no reporting outside our skin
for these blasts, or for apprehension’s current
our limbs dreams thoughts shivered in
each moment, even through the long troughs
between the last and the next crests to crash
against us, her voice a howl-and-screech wind
of memories we’d never see but which were meant
to sudden us. What, an enraged god’s sentencing,
or our inoculations for sensing
the blow, the galloping in the earth, the torch gang
again out of nowhere, that ever-raised gavel
we’d damn well know is about to land?
Unveiling
for my brother
We step softly so as to not wake
a soul, arrive either side, and each
take an edge of the gauzy cloth.
With a nod to one another we lift
the white fabric—day splashes
onto the polished gray, what stands
for our earliest love, light-sharpened
shadow letters and numbers carved
deep enough our grief seems
to bleed from the rock. But look,
it’s sorrow’s dark spores, like swarms
of tiny flies—they surround us
and buzz high dirges. What loops
we’ll follow from here—old commutes
or cheap winter seats to Cancun, empty
eyes out for fresh fill-ins—we’ll stay
stuck on repeat, our dazed longing
easily caught by the bored bus driver,
the half-asleep checkout clerk, laughing
gull guarding its garbage heap, even
the gnashing cash machine…a shame,
how this loss you’d never bring on
and couldn’t stave off you still take
as a sign you caused the pain. It was
no one. Look, in the unmasked stone,
it’s time playing the daylight. Time
winding all the way back, and up close,
notice, her house burns
to the earth, her first husband blows
in a landmine blast, her aching
wrists freeze at the crib rail over
the infant’s wail—it’s in the glinting
stump, here on these ill-tended grounds,
grass tall, hedge barely groomed, sky
a rowdy gallery, gang of cumuli,
pack of grinning voyeurs.
We take the rabbi’s Aramaic cue,
keep staring through the granite screen
and there, also, our innocence
wavers with the shade of the beech
swaying over the grave. And isn’t that
us now, jumping up and down
on the night-blue sofa, you and I each
other’s clown? It takes nothing
to keep our small selves in stitches.
Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and, forthcoming, Learning to Hold (Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award). Recent writing appears or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Poetry Review, RHINO, The Greensboro Review, Rust + Moth, Terrain.org, On the Seawall, The National Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Myers lives in Seattle, where he edits the journal Bracken.