Lovely Asunder: Poems

APOLOGIA

APOLOGIA They were on a train, in a tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan, when he said he felt quiet. She asked what quiet felt like and he said small. She knew more about him then, thought of how small he looked the night she told him she was sorry about their baby. The attic’s slant made everything smaller as she lay with her ear to his stomach to listen to him breathe. Music from a room downstairs rose through the floor, and when she told him, he went silent. They listened to a solo, the steel-string guitar holding and bending each long note until it broke into the next. When she realized he wouldn’t speak, she stood, left the house, and outside everything was huge—the night, the trees, the street became wider, longer as it led to the park. She found two young men beneath lamplight and oaks, unfolding an American flag they said they stole from a town near Mount Rushmore. It was small at first, but unfolded and unfolded until it veiled the entire field. She thought of mundane expectation, how a flag that size raised at the center  of a town might be seen for miles in a South Dakota landscape—how the people waking early, looking out at the Black Hills in half light, must have had a dim sense of something missing as they sipped coffee, chewed, swallowed their breakfast, stared out at the empty sky the way we might in the first weeks of winter, not quite seeing the bare limbs of trees, not yet knowing why this sense of loss, of displacement. And then her body felt too small to hold her, so she left it— drifted up through the pale lamplight, the boughs of dark oaks, watched one young man sprinting along the stripes, the other shouting the Pledge of Allegiance, and her body curled up over one giant star like something unborn inside it.  ...