Recursion
BY MATTHEW GELLMAN
That morning in Montreal,
the Gay Village quiet
as summer cleared its throat—
even then, you were distant from me
as the sound of my brother at the piano
those years when azaleas broke
and the debris of my childhood
overcrowded me.
The blue hauntology of your jacket
still hangs from my chair.
Your hair used to fall over my vision.
I let it break what I saw.
Your voice was deprecating,
but slick with the false promise
of generous hives buzzing behind
the tendril-locked door to your forest of mind.
*
Your hair used to fall all over my vision.
I let it break what I saw.
I will be here once, then never.
I will do this right, I tell myself.
Rain scarifies the red flocking of trees
and I think for a moment
no feeling is final, what Rilke said,
like music. What wings
in their deepening hurry have burnished
the umber branches they flew from.
Perhaps we could try again,
in a city with a small mountain for a heart.
I will do this right, and one time.
I will be here once, then never.
On the street, an acorn splitting open.
The yard darkening with cats.
In Pennsylvania, a Hurricane
BY MATTHEW GELLMAN
sprayed darts of rain at my six-year-old body
like a reckless drunk on a Saturday in a bar.
I was in the backyard, houses shuttered,
the wind trying to drag me
who knows where? Maybe into the sea,
which I knew even then never sleeps.
The gladioli were ruined pipe cleaners,
all of my mother’s flowers unstitched
by that mire, the weathervane flailing,
and wasn’t it like that again years later, in our bedsheets
when he instructed me in worthlessness,
pointing out my mawkishness
as he dumped the stale beer on my head,
the lights blaring before he disappeared for weeks?
Our world by then was a blown-out
radio on the floor in a house where one
battered curtain flapped crazily, still trying,
a redness hanging brightly.
The night in the window so dark, all glass became a reflection
and again, I was alone inside it.
Just me and the black-toothed forest.