Overread at Booth 4: Octobers

This is from an unpublished collection of poems entitled "The Subtle Difference Between Contingent and Contiguous"



Octobers

It’s a very rare sensation, what I’m about to describe to you,
so I don’t want you to think that this poem tells about a
persistent
feeling,

because it happens only at odd moments -
inbetween thoughts,
as though in the corner of an empty room where
I place the peripheral visions, those

tricks of the eye, that once you snap to look,

are gone,
but,

in those paperfolds of time,

I see the woman on the floor with the blood around her head,
and then I see myself stepping over her body to dial 9-1-1,
and as I hang up the phone, I
borrow a pair of scissors from the ICU nurse, to
cut a lock of hair from the grey mannequin
that only
five minutes before had contained my father,

and those two scenes, even though sixteen years apart,
are somehow
conjoined
now,
like two facing pages of the same folded sheet of paper,

and I realize, both for the first time and all over again, that

I am all that is left of each of them.


MR
2008-1028