| Dissolution
Jean is reducing Art one moment at a time
closing the book of his life
even as he dawdles about hour to hour, day to day
among rooms in their home, relics of a brief history
mimicking a former life, an existence on this earth this strange
plane.
Yesterday she gave the neighbor boy a box of tools
so heavy he could hardly lift them: wrenches, sockets, wire
half-empty tubes of pastes and glues, mysterious items
with labels long gone, erased by years of drying up, shrinking
like old men, old tools useless and still now.
Three days before that she gave away a weed trimmer, gas can,
and a spool of long yellow trimming line for the trimmer,
much thicker than the spool of yellow fishing line
now gone, too, with rods and reels and tackle boxes, nets.
And what is left now? This thinning, slowing man
and his ever-thinning, ebbing collection. Not much.
Very little after the bowling balls, bags, shoes.
After the mallard and teal decoys, the harvest gold hunting
suit,
north woods boots and four slick, shiny long-barreled guns.
What beautiful weapons they were!
Oh, how skies over the Great Miami River yearn
for Art to shoulder these monsters and point up
to an unadulterated heaven once more!
But winter upon him and no season for waterfowl,
death is the hunter and it's true, Art is in season
and the snow is banking north-south. |
|
James S Proffit is a police
officer in Reading, OH and the editor of Great Midwestern Quarterly. He has work published
in Worcester Review, Poet Lore and Main Street Press. He has assured us he "…has
never arrested a poet".
- Beauty for Ashes Poetry Review © 1996-2000
- A Creative Ash Publication © 2000
- Isaiah 61:1-3
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