SS Nevertheless, and: Varieties of Internal Torment

SS Nevertheless

The widower in silk pajamas slideshis hand along a glossy blue sleeve,

thinking, Water to fabric, rivuletslipped through a needle's eye.

He's all ripples when he moves,all waves breaking against flesh.

He read in the paper the human body is80 percent water. He is almost

a brook when he wandersaround the yard, practically a river

flowing upstream when climbing stairs,the distant past of Pacific salmon

leaping over his shoulders. He napsfor hours on a king-size, the mattress

dimpled where two bodies slepttogether for decades. Dreaming,

he is the relative of that lakewhere he tipped the urn overboard.

What was left of her the waterdissolved, becoming the water

and the lulling blue sounds it madewhile he paddled back to land.

Varieties of Internal Torment

Under the linden, a weatherwornbench. Eleven wooden slats in all

to build a simple thing for sitting.The one still generating green,

shawled in August sunlight,hovers over the one chainsawed

and hauled to the lumberyard.Each time it was split, sawdust leapt.

The bench was built. Years passedand now a pair of students sit together.

One has something impossible to saywithout hurting the other.

Hunched, bent from the burden of it,while the sun continues to

spangle the linden, green flameafter green flame, their faces dappled

in leaf-shadow. He knows he mustconfess, how to hammer the sentences

with enough nails spiking outfrom compressed lips. It will be over

soon, his hesitation marked byhow red the stripes behind her thighs.