“When You See It” by Rachel Jamison Webster

Rachel Jamison Webster

WHEN YOU SEE IT

It’s early in morning’s memory,
with that fog around the edges
and you, wrapped in blankets, rocking

just up and over the rung of consciousness
into the blurred limbs you are coming
to know as your own, into the car

clapping through a broth of wind and rain,
parents murmuring in the front seat
over wiper beats and soft talk radio—

sounds that will become the beginning and end
of love—a slow unwrapping
of cinnamon gum, and her, passing it to him

as he aims you straight and low.
The car slows. Then stops. She opens the door.
Asphalt. Bleached sky.

Across the road, a workman
is climbing the hotel sign.
He scales the tight white rungs

until he’s high as the building,
until he’s no longer
what you understand as a man

but something small enough to hold and bend,
like an action figure
or poem. Is this the moment,

years later, when you say,
the bag slung over his heart is filled
with black letters?

Is this when you have him pause
at the top, hot luck rushing his limbs
one March dawn, and how long

can you stare like this—at his body
interrupted with mist, his tiny hand
reaching into his bag,

and you, clutching orange juice,
still swaddling
your newness in this world—

before you see it—
his slip, no
no no

of a moment
over and over,
dropping

through
the hollow pole
of a life and

it goes on
happening and yet
it happened

almost slowly:
a man falling
like no more

than a bright spoked star of snow.
With you there,
trying to wake.

Rattle: Poetry