January 19, 2024The Visitor
You can get used to almost anything.
Like whatever it was that lived
in my best friend’s house when we were girls.
You’d hear its steady tic tic tic up and down
the stairs, feel it sweep past you
in the darkened hall. And what about
those nights we stayed up late
talking in the living room? How we kept
turning up the heat, but each time, the dial
slid back to its familiar chill.
The story: a medic back from World War II.
His apartment in the attic.
Which explains the time she woke
and saw a grizzled countenance
gazing down at her, a flashlight
fixed on her face.
And somehow, even after that,
kept on sleeping in her room,
dreaming under her thick blankets,
while he went on clodding down the hall,
taking notes, checking beds.
This is how it is to live with loss,
the visitor that never leaves. It walks
through your house. It eats your bread,
sleeps in an upstairs room. Sometimes,
you pass in the kitchen, give
each other a nod. More ordinary
than terrible. Except, some nights,
when it wakes you, shines its full heft
in your face and what was broken in you
breaks again, though after, your one half
tells the other what it knows:
such sorrow means you have survived,
have lived to bear its weight.
from #82 – Poetry Prize