Spencer Reece

How long do we wait for love?

Long ago, we rowed on a pond.

Our oars left the moon broken—

our gestures ruining the surface.

Our parents wanted us to marry.

Beyond the roses where we lay,

men who loved men grew wounds.

When do we start to forget our age?

Your husband and I look the same.

All day, your mother confuses us

as her dementia grows stronger.

Your boys yell: Red Rover!

We whisper your sister’s name

like librarians; at last on the list,

her heart clapping in her rib cage,

having stopped now six times,

the pumps opened by balloons,

we await her new heart cut

out from the chest of a stranger.

Your old house settles in its bones,

pleased by how we are arranged.

Our shadow grows like an obituary.

One of us says: “It is getting so dark.”

Your children end their game.

Trees stiffen into scrapbooks.

The sky’s shelves fill with stars.

The bishop places a paperweight atop my reports on his desk,

our professional talk is measured by the silence of the dead

who are always flinging open their shutters,

religion being the work of the living and the dead,

the hope and release of children turning to their parents –

all that business in life that remains unrehearsed.

Waiting with an unfinished, finished look

behind honeysuckles that crown Old Saybrook,

she is reading Vita Sackville-West,

he has food on his moth-eaten sweater vest.

Here’s the Oriental rug, still steeped in piss

from their bulldog who barked like an activist.

She seems happy, reigning with creams you FedExed,

rubbing his scalp, patched with scabby flecks

(as his squamous-cell carcinomas sprout,

the local dermatologist cuts them out

or frosts the growths with liquid nitrogen).

Tonight they talk of their last vegetable garden,

count out their pills in chipped cereal bowls

(you know the ones), check their sugar levels,

bicker over books misplaced, tchotchkes

lost, their tongues like well-used church keys.

Brother, last night half the garden nearly froze.

The dash between their dates is nearly closed.

By Roberto Sosa, a translation

The poor are many

and so —

impossible to forget.

No doubt,

as day breaks,

they see the buildings

where they wish

they could live with their children.

They

can steady the coffin

of a constellation on their shoulders.

They can wreck

the air like furious birds,

blocking the sun.

But not knowing these gifts,

they enter and exit through mirrors of blood,

walking and dying slowly.

And so,

one cannot forget them.