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Sewanee Review 115.1 (2007) 85-86

Life Disconnected
J. T. Barbarese

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt

Aeneid

Tears of Things

One of our wedding pictures has you staring
straight into the camera, like a mugshot, your back to a wall
long gone. The shadow end of the day. Life disconnected.

Scotch on a sill, amberish, a varicose grapevine,
fresh stucco with that popcorny texture, torn down
the left by your shadow—and you, expressionless, dimmed.

But mostly it's the tears in things I notice.
Would keeps breaking through was. Here we would kiss,
shag flies, play Wiffle ball. Then the mood passes,

nostalgia runs out of gas, and things roll to a stop,
normal-sized, less time-disfigured. Yours was any old life.
A day of it was one more day of the change

as transparent and as permanent as the tank
to the fish that swims in circles around a perimeter
whose redundancy is a physical law, like light speed.

In its umpteenth iteration, if it notices,
it may see a handsome old man staring into the distance,
like God out of work.

Things burble.
It thinks you're watching.
The sun beats down. [End Page 85]

After Dropping the Kids off

he's suddenly alone. The sun
repeals his solitude, his vision
overflows. He says hello to Mike,
and Mike's lawnmower roars back as if to say,
What a beautiful idea, a lawnmower!
purring Pythagoras and solving the lawn
as if lawns were green equations. He nods and waves
to Penelope, whose upper lip is the white
underside of a slimed leaf. His lilies are uncoiled hose,
his closed roses are Juliet's nipples. His hand rises
as if to fly away, like a tethered hawk,
and his thoughts rush to the edge of his eyes
and lean over, astonished passengers, shocked and happy.
He is that ghostly smudge in the sun-bludgeoned windshield
of an accelerating car. He is an American Orpheus
with no passport or portfolio. He begins to forgive
things that happened to others — to his father's barber,
his favorite teacher, figures in history,
characters in novels — and remembers a boy
unpeeling and flinging his clothes off a Paris roof,
those men with their big ears and gangster clothes
reading soaked foreign newspapers, that funny-faced blur
shaking in the soapy water. The day is a spectacular
air show over the ocean. Everything he knows
is uniquely everyday. He is in the press box
and his life is standing room only. That whistling sound
is his soul's happy heigh-ho. All that he cannot find
in his life up to now is spread out like a yard sale.
His thought is a physical law, a thing in the world.
Long blue poles run from his eyeballs and hold
the sky-tent up over all. He catches his breath,
ambushed by ecstasy. How he loves his life
is what he must explain. Life is writing an essay
and I am the topic sentence
. He says this once
and nothing happens. Mike has finished mowing.
The silence is devastating. Things stink of life.

J. T. Barbarese, who remains in Philadelphia, has written essays, reviews, and poetry for the SR for over two decades.

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