The
Executive at Midlife
Rising
through leaves of damp undergrowth,
he wakes to the beeping of e-mail at midnight,
catching his glasses as they slide through tears.
Mary sleeps in their bed upstairs, her unsaid
“Good Night” a new rite of marriage.
He strays
from study to den and back, losing
TV’s guide on the way, opening new books
on leadership, shutting them again.
Snagging on a kitchen chair, his ego tears,
spilling rags and ribbons of shadow behind him.
He scoops
and carries the silk of his life
like dirty laundry, gray socks dropping,
out the backyard door. Kneeling like a boy
of twelve, he spreads his dark self
on the wet lawn in moonlight, searching
for an
underthing to blot his midlife bleeding.
But pocket string in worn blue jeans pulls him
back to childhood. Play cat’s cradle, hands
like walls, songbird net to catch our falls,
stop the spin of downward flights.
His mother’s
bathrobe lies in a heap.
He bends and lifts its fraying hem
to rub her hard soap scent on his mouth and neck.
Makeup on its collar speaks more to him
than her china cups in that old sideboard.
Digging
in a wash of loss left by his daughter
unearths relics of her starved adolescence.
Her bird bones snap in his grip. He shrinks
from fresh insight of his failure. His breath
cannot fill her lungs, fuel her waning flight.
And around
him rising like nighthawks
in headlights, whisper random hands
of every employee, reaching in,
as through a car window, to touch him.
Opening a door, he climbs out of himself,
shedding
his snakeskin softly behind him.
Stars glitter and blink in folds of his wings
as his blood mingles with feathers. Pay in soul,
may it make one’s people whole, cling
upon a cross to brace this universe open.
Sidewalks
of Phoenix
I
Stars break
softly on the sidewalks of Phoenix.
I collect fragments and fill my pockets.
You pass me. My smile is a streak of light
vanishing in your darkness. You are as secret
as a mole underground, an elf owl roosting in cactus.
II
Entering
his bathroom, my brother brushes his arm
against something in the blackness. He flicks on
the night light. No one. The fluttering curtain.
A cockroach slips through a puddle of moonlight;
toilet water is flooding the floor.
III
Feet up,
Death leans back in my father’s armchair.
His presence in our kitchen is comfortable
as simmering stew and hot, baked bread.
Memories steep like slumbering cave bears.
I rest my cheek on his hair, making plans.
Copyright © 2001 Deborah Finch
