Thick With Conviction - A Poetry Journal

THE BREATHING MASK

i.m.: Patricia Lewis Smith, 1953-2005

The breathing mask slipped from your sleeping face;

Alarm bells sounded to alert the nurse.

By Monday, you'd be comatose, but worse

Was this drugged drowse beginning to erase

The wife I loved, as from some distant place,

Speech slurred by morphine, you began to rise:

The wiring all undone, death in your eyes,

Your heartbeat's scrawl gone still without a trace.

In the blunt country of your agony,

By what strange chance did that obscene alarm

So closely mime our bedside clock at home?

The last words you would ever say to me—

"We gotta go to work!"—meant to disarm.

Then, the abysmal silences to come.

THE TRUTH OF YOUR RIGHT FOOT

"A name is not a leash."

—Mary Oliver

All of our bones are pilgrims, truth be told,

Journeying far beyond their sheaths of flesh

Toward dreams of incandescence that unfold

Deep in our inmost darkness. Pliant, fresh,

They burn the slow fuse of the marrow low;

Patient as saints, they bear our loneliness;

The farthest stars are kindled by their glow;

They flare out bravely in the emptiness.

But, after all, a name is not a leash;

Naming the body does not make it ours—

It is the expectation of release

That finds us at the summit of our powers.

The truth of your right foot is that it stands

Firm and unmoved upon unstable sands.

Robert Lavett Smith was born in Michigan in 1957 and grew up in northern New Jersey, in a suburb of New York. Since 1987, he has lived in San Francisco, where for the past thirteen years he has worked as a Special Education Paraprofessional for the San Francisco Unified School District. He holds an M.A. in creative writing from the University of New Hampshire, where he studied with Charles Simic and Mekeel McBride. In 1982, he studied with Galway Kinnell, as a member of the Master Class at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. He is the author of four small-press chapbooks, and most recently, of a full-length collection, Everything Moves With A Disfigured Grace (Alsop Review Press, 2006). A collection of his sonnets, Smoke In Cold Weather, will hopefully be published by the Full Court Press some time this summer.