2/22/2017 0 Comments Three poems by Robert WalickiThe Tree In The Lake Fall’s almost over, but the trees here, are still throwing up their arms in disgust, littering the broken road with their wet, green tongues, the gutters, full of their broken branches. Every plant I’ve ever touched, I’ve found a way to kill, like this Eastern Redbud that lies at my mercy, a hard ball of woody roots, thick fisted and still frozen. I am thinking of the first thing I did the day after the election, a click on a random picture, of a tree growing out of water, like a trick of the light, or a gorgeous impossibility. I wondered how far down all of its crooked fingers went, if every wet percentage of my body fell, and found a groove down its rough arms, broke the wet slap of the lake and followed it to its end? But seeing isn’t always understanding. I know I need to kneel for this, to get more ass behind the stake, to rip strips of duct tape and cinch it, as if tighter is always better, as if this was something I could save. I want to get back to what matters, what’s been broken everywhere, but Joe’s wife just died, and Paul has cancer, his hockey sticks and baseball bats traded for a colostomy bag. I’m not envious of the lives of trees, bending to the weather, the soon dead evergreen, dresses made of wind and needles, too tall to do anything but fall over, crash through the roof, clog the gutters with whatever they shed, however sick they got, with their frozen rivers of sap, their dark hospital robes pulling back to reveal their exhausted wrinkles, their nakedness. 30 years ago, behind my mother’s house, I watched them block out everything but the light, a break I could see through if the wind blew, if I leaned over the porch railing, and waited. Work of Hands I’m taking my ears off again for the television, buds from headphones shoved into a place where Patti smith is screaming. Because 2 minutes from a press conference was all I needed to hear about how the world would end, with another lie and a pool of piss in a Russian hotel room. I’d mention its name, but I’d rather talk about Patti again, how she makes it sound like you have to be broken to sing. I was 15 when she whispered my name in the language of static, messy headed and dreamy. Rainy Saturdays, I laid the needle of her down in my bedroom, set the world inside me spinning. By the time the bus arrives, I am 16 and there is no 2 hour delay, no cancelation to keep the scud missile, school bus yellow from crashing into the glass door of my adolescence and a 9th grade classroom to be called names as if they were curses, as if it was a power they held over me. I wrote incantations instead of poems to break their hold, trading sissy and weirdo for 20 years and a pickup truck, exhaust and college blowing out into muddy jobsites, Men drinking coffee, running jack hammers, blasting country music, the worst music ever invented. They stand at break and tell black jokes while I stared into a hole even darker, but I’m new at this In the morning, I’ll turn off my truck radio and go to a place no one wrote a song for yet where work waits in the freezing rain in a ditch line, in that dirty boiler room, where a man in a rebel flag bandana holds a ladder for me, asks if I voted yet. If I am the leg climbing up, he is the hand holding on, my foot on the last rung, twisting into a place where the pipe always goes in, where my silence isn’t something that has a name, and we go on like this without talking, doing this work of hands, speaking to each other in the mute language of the body the hunched back, the shaking wrist this bearing down and turning, both of our hands on the pipe wrenching it down, driving it home. What Breaks You Say it’s because of the house, that you are coming and your mother’s desperation over the mouse she can’t see. Say it’s the scratching behind the walls, the shy fist of its body, bristling past the stacks of cracked dishes, behind the slow roaster only pulled out for Thanksgiving, where it’s already made a careless nest of straw, droppings the withered articles stuffed in the gaps of the walls for “insulation”. You think of the soft blonde spiders that used to get in through broken screens after rain, or the stink bugs that cling to her vapor thin drapes, the scribble of their legs on your wrist. You are taking the air conditioner out of her window because Summer is over, and the grass at last, has stopped dying. Later, she’ll offer a bottle of water to you from the fridge and a porch to lean on, with its chipped railing and drink while your sister smokes, talks about the kids. The son flunked out, the daughter’s boyfriend who broke a windshield with his fists. There is still enough silence here to fill a coffee cup with spent butts, hold on to what you’d wish you’d say, what you have no words for. Even the backyard pines are acting like nothing’s wrong, they glisten with sap and brush the needled dirt with their green skirts, as if they too, weren’t weighed down by more than the wind. You watch them, and the curtain parts for two city deer, and the hushed apathy of their bodies, they saunter, like teenagers in a mall, cresting the hill just to kick over the neighbor’s birdhouses thick with seed and spilling over, and you are speechless in your envy, jealous of their reckless freedom, the sound of their hooves stumbling awkwardly, against a twig , and suddenly you are 21 again, coming home drunk in the dark, falling into the door of your mother’s anger. Not because you were thoughtless, just that you were young and dumb with discovery. When you are ready to ask about the mouse she’ll be nodding off in her green chair. Her hair now, shorn and boyishly practical. But what breaks you now is she isn’t afraid anymore, that the reason she called you is lost down some dark hole, to live out its own wild and desperate life. ------------------------------ Image - Rachel Sapp www.flickr.com/photos/rks71794/ Bio: Robert Walicki is the curator of Versify, a monthly literary reading series in Pittsburgh, PA. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including I-70 Review,The Kentucky Review, and The Red River Review A Pushcart nominee, he currently has two chapbooks published: A Room Full of Trees (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014) and The Almost Sound of Snow Falling (Night Ballet Press, 2015), which was nominated to the 2016 Poet's House in New York.
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