Fractions
Remember Solomon from The Bible?
Well, he was wrong: anything
can be divided, even a mother’s
body, without prompting virtue
in at least one of her children.
She’s dead, of course, unlike
the infant in the story, and in theory
no more damage can be done
to her, but her memory is whole;
her spirit is whole. Who wants
another round of motherhood,
being ripped to shreds
by the snarling wolves of want?
Who wants to spend eternity
in so many dens at once?
The crematorium is king now,
dispensing its fiery wisdom
or what passes as wisdom: the body
without blood. Like cockroaches
after the apocalypse, acrimony
shall prevail. Bring in the lawyers.
“You will each get one-fifth
of your mother’s remains.” Although
every child says he should get all
of her, my claim—I know, I know—
seems more reasonable. After all,
I protected her with my skull,
with my ten-year-old bones.
Would that she were a fifth
of Jack Daniels! We’d sit at a bar
until we were toast, burnt
beyond recognition, which is
just how she liked her toast.
She was the one who taught me
fractions, a family’s improper ones.
Final
It almost has the word “fine” in it,
as in, “My mother was so fine.”
Like a ghost, the “e” is present,
though not in person.
“Finial,” too, that ornament of love
on the roof ridge of sorrow.
“Up here! Up here! Look at me!”
cries the wanting “i.”
How my mother could fashion a house!
(A decorator never calls
anything decorative.)
Black walls in a living room!
And “fail,” though it isn’t lacking a letter.
A coffin, like a narcissist, never pines.
The word is short on life;
it always makes a killing.
Marriages fail, businesses fail…
Never trust a broker—
Cupid, oxygen, E.F. Hutton—
that alphabets against you.
Walking in a Cemetery
It’s a little bit like watching bad TV
and enjoying it all the same,
enjoying it because it’s bad TV.
The asinine plot—from life to death;
what a cliché!—and under-the-bottom
acting. “Speak for Christ’s sake.
Don’t just lie there.”
You’d never want your friends
to know your lapse in taste…
I was getting in my steps—
we mortals want to minimize
our weight and maximize our time--
when the deer sought
the counsel of the dead
or maybe just the counsel of the grass,
which had suffered,
like the deer themselves,
through a drought.
They appeared, the four of them--
coats thick with burs and brambles.
They looked like children
eating without a bib.
They had traveled to this clearing
and to these granite whitecaps
on a prairie—or what used
to be a prairie and is now a lawn.
I smiled, knowing that I aspired
to avoid this place in body.
My mind was like a balloon,
looking down on death
with so much frightened arrogance.
The deer at least were baffled
by the pageantry—the flowers, the flags.
Perhaps from another perspective
I was already dead, for the doe came up
to me without a care in her nose.
A Wing and a...
For Carlo and Pilar
The cabbies in Rome have gone on strike.
They’re like disgruntled angels
in the heart of St. Peter’s,
little bits of plaque that cause a stroke
and paralyze the streets.
These days, even God’s a capitalist
keeping wages down.
How in heaven will I get home
if I can’t even make it to the airport?
5000 miles from Iowa
and running a temperature of 102,
I’m hardly Marcus Aurelius
spouting stoical thoughts
on his own pandemic death bed.
No, as is typical of me in a pinch,
I’m flying panic colors
and erecting gallows in my mouth:
The airline, no doubt, will lose
my rollaboard carcass…
How strange to ride with the luggage
in the plane’s undercarriage…
Only the living need oxygen at 37000 feet…
My son, who has advanced
degrees in loss—my wife and I
adopted him from foster care—
begged me to return.
“Do anything, Dad. I need to see you.”
COVID protocols be damned.
And so, donning two masks
and throwing a coat over my head,
I made my passage to the overworld,
everyone around me coughing
and on their own errand of need.
(Only the dead follow rules.
Only the dead behave ethically.)
When I land, it’s straight into isolation:
a run-down college rental with a ratty bed.
I want to say I’m Keats in Iowa City,
but, of course, I’m not. I’m no one.
This must be what prayer is like
for the believing when someone dies.
The deceased takes up residence
down the street, remaining close
but refusing contact—they do not want
to give you what they have.
You cannot touch or talk to them,
yet every day at 3:00, you drive by.
All of you, even the deceased,
waving frantically...
Envy
It’s a deadly sin
and perfectly alive
on my face:
a pet tarantula,
climbing the granite
ridge of my nose,
pooping in my eyes,
those murky
ponds,
those acorns
that only a pathetic
squirrel
would prize.
I want to be young!
I want to be rich!
I want to have
my words printed
on the sun!
The tarantula—
let’s call him Terry—
appears to be searching
for my hair.
“It’s gone,
you son of a bitch!
You’ve landed
on the moon.
Call NASA if you want
to come home.”
Envy, that mad
counterfactual, is
a chef’s kitchen:
the dishes piling up,
the pots getting stoned.
When the oven
opens its mouth,
an aria crawls in.
“For too long,”
Terry says,
sounding like some sort
of consigliere,
“you’ve kept me
at virtue’s length.
I will bite you and
you can taste
everything.”
Ralph James Savarese is the author of two books of prose and three books of poetry. His work has appeared, among other places, in American Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Seneca Review, Sewanee Review, and Threepenny Review. He lives in Iowa.