Footsteps On The Ceiling by Baila Ellenbogen

Author:Baila Ellenbogen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry
ISBN: 9781550715460
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Published: 2010-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

DISAPPEARING

This is the feeling of abandonment.

But me disappearing from

you. Being absorbed from your thoughts

into air.

A smell you recognize,

a face you saw once,

an old friend of your husband,

or wife

or mother.

The reaching metal wheels of the subway,

sliding wheels like skis on tracks

falling asleep on your seat,

over and over and over.

THE HOUR BEFORE

It is the hour when the night sky

frays to a new pale light and the sidewalks

are empty. The hour when each tree

pulls the darkness out of the air

into its hood of clattering birds —

when the highway’s hoarse voice

rises and the last hand of wind passes through

the lawns. When the sigh of the bus with no one in it

leans like a magnet towards the fence

standing half-built at the end of the street.

The subway slips over the hill, silver on silver.

The hour when young men in heavy sweat-suits

wait for a lift in the shadows of government

housing. Later children will jump and twist

in the spots of afternoon sun.

When the morning doves wriggle into patches

of bare dirt in the schoolyard

to find coolness against their hearts,

and the peonies topple over everywhere,

as if they’ve finally given up being flowers,

being full, being grown, being empty, all at the

same time. The hour before waking when lawns

are a wilderness and the sky is as dark as a lake

before rain. The gentle streets are paths

between the selves of here and there,

now and before. My voice is a far-off clip of glass

hitting a pit in the road while the voices shouting

out the windows are full of early air exuberance —

I look for the last time at the leaves of the trees

that are dark and like hands of bark,

like a million palms, gazing toward

the prism shade inside.

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