Day of the Dead
We know by now you could still call, tap that
low landline voltage to let us know we
can let go of you, lay you in that basket
of rushes that floats away in our minds,
finds you living with a pharaoh until
you return to lead us through the desert
and receive your dry commandments, what all
patriarchs do. Surely where you are you
see a way to let us know you arrived
and are there yet beyond the veil, bumping
in the night, coins dropping from another
world and ringing off the table, the lights
flickering on without switch, dark thumps, a
deep sigh that fills the house first with the sound and
then the absence of exhalation, as
I search for you under the stairs when they
are creaking, after I’ve splintered into
parts that act independently yet make
up the whole, each of them looking, looking
for you, seeking still. What are the rules of
disengagement and separation in
the next dimension, when a dot becomes
a line which transforms to a box with length,
depth, and height, then steps beyond the space we
think we understand, mistaking little
toe for the entirety of body,
like misreading a beginning for an
end, confusing this current world with life.
~
A Bay with New Houses
What we can’t see, hear, and touch doesn’t
exist, witnesses with eyes open,
listeners with ears ringing so loud
there’s nothing else, fingers still calloused
after years of inactivity,
even trembling some days, obscured
perception become the foundation
where we stand if ninety percent of
what we say’s nonverbal, the other
ten percent what we merely voice, a
mutual firework descending
into ash. I look across a bay
with new houses, the egrets rising,
or are they juvenile blue heron,
my heart beating like a bell as the
sky lights a lone cirrus stretched across
the horizon like the remnants of a
dream. The deck was once new, now starting
to rot, whatever arsenic in
our treated wood dripped down into the
soil, leached to some water table we
don’t drink, contractor due tomorrow
with his composite materials.
~
The Wind Outside Raging
You were to come for dinner at seven
where I was house sitting for a couple
gone to Maine. Instead, you arrived after
midnight. The candles had melted down to
the base of the ceramic holder and
sputtered out, the meal cold, but I let you
in. Upstairs, I thought you’d know more about
women, but you took care of yourself, then
fell asleep. I rose and did the dishes,
never went back to the pillow where you
awoke at dawn to catch a two-day train
to go out West, lost until the next time,
when I was living in a cabin in
the woods. After a winter storm, I took
you to the caves, our feet squeaking in the
hush until you grabbed a stick to thump the
tree trunks we were passing, making the snow
drop off in sheets, drowning out the scolding
blue jay, the invisible wood pecker
knocking away up high, the crow cawing
as he sounded the alert, unneeded
because the whole world knew by then you were
in the forest and did not understand
enough to be quiet in the presence
of majesty. You had a beard and told
strangers your name was Abraham, said your
mother wrote letters you never finished.
I did not shave, told strangers loving them
meant nothing, both of us with our simple
lies, my stilled tears while you slept in tangled
covers, foreign to each other even
with a fire and the wind outside raging.
~
Most recently, Sandra Kolankiewicz’s work has appeared in Fortnightly Review, Blue Mountain, and Harbinger Asylum.