Love Poem with Broken Voice
Words sit at the base of your throat and squeeze up
one by one, like frog legs kicking and rising,
coaxed by the hand-held shock below where the hole is—
Your house is small and not so neat or clean, now that your wife
is diminished by this wide clear window of silence,
so that all her chatter of butter and eggs and buttons
and when the grandchildren might come to visit,
might fold their hands around hers and she
wake at a touch from her stunned sorrow—
will not bring it to voice.
You talk to me outside the language you can no longer say—
The telephone, dark corner witness, grimed with your hands'
old dirt she does not wipe clean, in memory of the palms'
daily sweat, the casual words that fell forth before this,
about nothing—about how your son should help you
re-side the green shed struck by lightning,
about how your daughter should not treat her daughter too hard,
about how the dealer was late delivering
two more broken, red, oxidized harrows
for your pile of antique machinery out back—
preparing then, although you did not know it,
for a time when this daily plainsong no longer would sing,
a time when you would be so wounded, so open
to all the love, all the language that filled you then,
like a blue sky stuffed full of cloud,
water-stuffed to bursting—
You were a plain man, never wordy. Words were
never there—just the small contentments of your life,
wordless as a petal growing from a bud,
satin-white, slender as a strand
of your daughter's baby hair still glinting
twenty years late, against the couch cushion
where you sit with the smell of reflux
from that hole in your throat, and look the words at me.
© Mary Elizabeth Parker