Three poems by Robert F. Gross

around about sixty-five


the conversation has frozen over on the irregular footpath. he’s misplaced his gloves and  
forgotten the word for I. it was something else in the language of his youth but no one speaks that
now even the young have different rags to clean their boots.

the weather has cleared. there are no circumlocutions on the horizon and no purpose either. the
numbing process has begun and he wonders how it would feel to whistle his breath away.

he wonders if he could be dreaming but decides against it. the cold sharpness in his rib cage. the
stiffness of his stache are reality, he tells himself. Then he remembers a friend telling him you
can't dream your own death, you wake up first.

he wonders if that friend is still alive and if so where.

he has forgotten the name for friend.

he wonders if you can die in your dream unaware. or if you’re safe so long as you know it’s a
dream you’re dying in. or if every dream is a death of sorts.

he wonders what counts as dying these days.

the river has not frozen over entirely. but it’s not going anywhere either. there’s a plane overhead
and some mantras are being expelled from a ramshackle barn. they keep their heads low and do
not acknowledge their angry master. it’s a sullen kind of praying that they do.

not so for him who has forgotten the words for prayer. he eyes the ice needle horizon knowing it
can’t be threaded and follows the footpath into a flock of nonsense that scatters before it can be
stalked into thought or expression.





Sunset in Morning


The sun came up under the footbridge.
Admired its face in brook. Sang.

Fell in love with himself all the way
down to the muddy fundamental

Past the catfish and frogs.  Fell
beyond the cellar of the world.

Broke and shattered in candles
no bigger than bus tokens. Sang

Until one by one the tokens all
went out. Sank to the absolute

Bottom of the things where shadow
clocks gobble up sunshine and song.

​



Revisionist Wedding


It was all memorized at once and at once forgotten. A shattering of memorabilia fragile as mom’s
figurines taken out of the breakfront and confronted in broken. Forgotten and erased as rapidly as
tape at once erased and overwritten. A reconfiguration of memoranda in a new medium.
Memory loop reworked and replayed at once.

He came to regard all his memories as falsifications.

His sister showed him her wedding photos. See. You were there. Who else would it be? But he
had no memories of the midnight blue tuxedo, the altar, the conga line behind the country club.
Later, he had memories of the wedding photos but still no memories of the wedding.

It was all memorized at once and at once forgotten.

Too much had happened, he told himself. The wedding had been overwritten. Besides, it had
ended in divorce. She was married to someone else now. Someone taller.

His dead lover, now called partner, would have become a husband if he had lived. Only now he
only appeared nameless in dreams and that only rarely. In the most recent dream he was a guest
at the sister’s wedding, welding figurines on top of the wedding cake. But he couldn’t have been
there. Because the wedding was long before he made his entrance in the locker room and the
dream long after he made his exit in the hospice.

A reconfiguration of memoranda in a new medium.

Then the dream became memory and lasted long after more substantial and melodramatic
memoranda had been obliterated. Except in the memory the welding torch became wedding
march and the cake became a coffin.

He wished he could photograph his dreams and mount them. He wished he could share them
with his sister. He wished his dreams could overwrite all memorabilia and memoranda. He
wished he could weld the memory loops into barbed wire fences to keep the anger out.

A shattering of memorabilia against the sea wall. And overwritten.

​

New Bio? Robert F. Gross recently directed Love for Sale at the SoHo Playhouse in Manhattan. He's had pieces appear in Strange Poetry, Tigershark, Sein und Werden, and The Rain, Party and Disaster Society. He does work at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester NY, and is wondering whether he should get another tattoo.

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