Ars Poetica with Inheritance & Refuse
the neighbors’ son looks
about forty. he’s standing
beneath the oaks in their
backyard, bellowing, just
say you’ll never give it to me,
meaning the house in
which the three of them
now live. he kicks out
the dirt beneath his feet,
grabs at the air his parents
can’t take with them and
his fists become the wind,
that force that shakes
the trees, that after all
these years can still get
the trees to shaking
the way my mother’s
coworkers did when
i caught them mimicking
her gait. to be an acorn
at the feet of that son,
the cold cuts of lamb
we brought his parents
in a blue dish at the far
back of the refrigerator,
she was very ill, my mother,
and the silence coming
from the neighbors’ house
tells me that we can be
ashamed of our children
much in the way we are
of our own capacity.
i was ashamed of her,
but for what? no longer
being able to hold me?
not hiding the disability?
what i remember most
vividly is watching daylight
render briefly visible the dust
floating between her body
on the bed and the ceiling
she studied til sundown
in those years. i remember
not being able to look
right at her, only half
toward where she was
looking, at the plaster
whose every groove
and inclination she had
memorized by heart. it hurts
to think how long ago
that was, how young
i must have been.
youth excuses almost
everything. the son
has stopped his flailing.
all of a sudden he’s holding
a new-fallen acorn
in his hand, inspecting
it sad-like as a stone
he’ll roll again tomorrow,
or maybe asking himself
what use it is to plant a seed
he knows he can’t watch
grow. no matter. he’s quiet
now, the house is quiet,
he quietly opens the sliding
door and disappears inside.
mother,
out in the street i can hear
the garbage men. they’ve
come to collect that for which
i have no use, to drive it
far from me, to place it
in a machine that compresses
things into their smallest,
tightest form, to leave it rest
inside some ditch, waiting
to be buried or burned,
expressing only itself.
forgive me.
whosamawatsit
for A.
& who were they for, those years of waiting,
threading the nails i clipped along the seams
of night? by moonlight you look just like them—
not the one i can’t forget, but the one
i did, the heart i let slip downriver
three years to the day. plop! went the river.
farewell! dear heart. the blue monkeyflowers
will learn to open without you, i said,
between huckleberry bushes and dreams
i’ve only now grown old enough to reach.
i suppose i was waiting on a season
the spell for which i refused to speak. what
was it your father used to say? forget
my name. when you met me i wasn’t myself.
Selves-Portrait as Game in Woods
there is so much pleasure to be taken in doing one last thing before
supper. we were trudging along, icicles hanging from the bracken,
the snow crunching beneath our feet, for a brief moment i was your age
and you were mine. the cottage where we’d met was miles behind us.
this is what the grammarians call an antecedent. we were playing
already, i just hadn’t told you yet. this is what i call a secret. i was unbearable,
i was delightful, i was running up ahead and hiding behind trees in my bright
vicissitudes and fleece. i wanted to hear you call my name, and when you did
i came and found you, wiping the wings off the hoarfrost of a bird.
you wanted to bury it so you could one day write the poem of burying the bird.
i wanted to hear my name on your tongue in my ears, breathing hard.
i ran farther this time, the woods seemed closer together and the trees
looked more like fingers. that’s when i saw the rabbit up ahead, just like grandpa
said i might. it was the rabbit he chased after all his antecedent life.
poor grandpa. i caught it but it just turned into four serpents in my fist.
the serpents dropped to the ground with a mind to slither off in all directions,
but there are more than four of those, and so each twitched once and then lay still.
i grew bored and began to search for you. i searched for you for what felt
like a long time, but i was bored in the forest and my phone was dead. i stopped
searching and went home. years later at the cottage i asked father if we could finally
talk about it, what happened in those years. you know, he said. sometimes you hurt me too.
Benjamin Bartu is a poet & disability studies researcher. He is the author of the chapbook Myriad Reflector (2023), finalist for the Poetry Online Chapbook Contest. His poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net, and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal, Sonora Review, Bellingham Review, HAD, nat.brut, Guesthouse, & elsewhere. He lives in Oakland, California.