The Weight
February 2nd
The Path train at Hoboken
to New York, the long flight of stairs ahead,
and you've walked it thousands of times before,
so why today do you think to slide down
like your sons’ fictional heroes?
But you hike aside your bulky winter jacket,
feel the sticky, new-denim friction in your pants —
not that smooth easy-sliding feel,
and you see your path slowing down
with handrail sticky commuter pulse,
jellyroll, beer, or maybe blood,
labor recession fear,
failure that floods all reason,
and think that with backpack
bulging completed poems and drafts, MSNBC
printouts, the latest presidential intrigues
or Paris and Britney debacle, ridiculous paper
adding up to real weight, what little
regard we give to its substance
how it complicates our lives,
newspapers selling hope and despair
on the same page one inch apart
sorrows foreign and domestic,
Shakespearean tragedies,
mortgage and credit card debt,
the will to survive,
and who will inherit this accumulation
of cuts, defeats, doubts, real
sorrows, falling from
a great height — think what if that weight
shifted, pulled
you over helmetless —
it’s never the fall that hurts
it’s the landing —
and there he is again,
your father, born this day — Groundhog Day —
what did he think about his life —
what everlasting “What-ifs . . .” he had in that split-
second that you never knew but always
rethought for him before his passing
when he let some 160-pounder
try to handle his motorcycle
on a slick road in the middle-
of-nowhere-Buffalo-night
and his weight on the back too hard
to handle —
maybe he really was thinking to leave again
only not this way;
is that what his absence
has left you with —
reckless childish drama,
some brief cry of Whee!
or I am —
is it worth all the darkness
the weight of forty-five years
when what sustained you
weren’t the stories you were told
but only those moments
that were so much yours alone
they became like the baseball
he once hit so high into the air
it remained there — a melody
against the sky, sun and shadow
spun on a splash of white,
a blue background open to a universe,
a world that was forever,
aloft in those brief seconds
before it fell from the air,
the weight pulling it downward,
shining against the light . . .
Previously published in "lips," Fall 2008/Winter2009,
Number Thirty/Thirty One.
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