5040 Sherier
They’re gone, now. Someone was home
through spring; there was a car in back.
Ivy as always probes
the ten stone steps no weed broke,
descending from street level into weeds.
The tarpaper roof looks whole; the outside
wall, some proto-vinyl, no yellower.
The windows as before are dark and shadeless,
but one can tell a dead from a living eye.
Against one, a peculiar faded
pink-and-blue linoleum leans.
In another, crumpled newspaper,
and, on the sill, what might be
a bar of the kind of soap
that suggests washboards, or the block
of wood around which sandpaper is wrapped,
if any of these still exist.
The oldest house in the neighborhood
has a seller, who has a number
on a sign. It also has,
in a more abstract sense, a past:
bunting on V-days, yellow ribbons
for other wars, the Big Broadcasts
to which everyone listened.
And at the end this elegy,
which could be presented as its most
real feature, really its most tenuous.
Gerontion
Not hoping to be cured, or to be a cure,
but only less a symptom, you leave your
door open to the corridor
for cooler if not better air.
When they come to “struggle” with you –
you’re straining resources
for everyone, inflicting your smell
and commotion on everyone – you yell
*It’s not me causing trouble*,
and tell tales about everyone
on the floor. Which creates,
in fact, quite a ruckus,
and will seal your doom when you’re alone.
So they linger, glad of an opportunity
for pity. Aren’t you happier
here where privacy is sacrosanct
and you have your own hotplate,
than on floors without doors, where all
eating, sleeping, and values
are communal? *There’s bastards everywhere*,
you mutter. And if
you were broke you’d be moved to a ward
or dropped in the garbage Outside. But they’ve noticed
how your television (they use
the old word “window”) doesn’t show
the Resurrection taking place
at every moment all around us,
the final bestowal of judgment and meaning
and grace. It’s hard to tell
what it does show, they point out: it’s off.
They seem less pleasant now.
You shrug. You didn’t need alternatives
to realize that you lived in lies and noise.
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