First Week Home

I am trying to believe
what I’ve been told, but I see the
jagged, angry zipper of stitches
running down the left side of your head –
not the half-moon shape they promised,

and I see your eyes,
emptied by fear and pharmaceuticals,
while your smile pleads with me
and the girls to be reassured,

but I know you too well –
I know your unrelenting desire
to consume everything life has to offer –
I know you are shocked at your silence
and impatient with our efforts
to speak your mind,

and I am trying to believe
what we’ve been told,
and I’m trying to believe the things I say.

I have found the words…

you’ve been looking for
squatting in an empty warehouse,
where the windows have been broken
and pages of memories
litter the floor among the mess the wind has made.

Others hide beneath the basement stairs,
inscrutable as sleeping children.

Still others have been discarded
along with the blueberry stalks you pruned away last fall
and hauled to the kindling pile,
to start the fires you’ve only begun to imagine.

Some are merely echoes and whispers
but I can feel their quiet insistence –
like watching a heartbeat in a baby’s fontanel.

I can hardly bring myself to tell you
what they’ve been saying behind your back –
that they love you and belong to you
but need their space.

Like runaways who won’t return home,
they give fake names to the authorities
and never sleep in the same place twice

Mount Hope Cemetery – Rochester, NY

I am walking in the biggest graveyard
I’ve ever seen –
a beautiful July day, and a comfort –
no bells, no muffled conversations
or squeaking nurses’ shoes,
no desperate whimperings
or beeping monitors.

I am searching for Frederick Douglass and
Susan B. Anthony, well, their graves anyway,
when a red-tailed hawk appears
and settles in the grass between the wrought iron fence
and the sidewalk along the busy street,
the hospital on the other side.

I pull out my phone and take its picture
as it stares back at me – eventually I switch to video
while it flaps into the branches of a stunted oak
and I can’t help but think –
this bird doesn’t belong here
any more than I do,
but here we are, and I wonder what it’s
hoping for – maybe for the sausage vendor at the corner
to drop a link or two.

She is recovering they tell me,
will be sent home soon they tell me,
all will be well they tell me
but nothing feels right –
what with her silence and her prescriptions,
and her story she can’t tell.

It’s as if the sun has had a child
and that child needs to speak,
and that speech comes to us
in the sounds of hospital wards and hallways
where gurneys rumble with their cargo like great ships
passing through narrow canals,
because someone needs to speak for the sun
or at least decode the squeaks and beeps and whimpers
or make some sense of the stationary hawk staring
back at us from the shoulder of a busy city street,
waiting for us to put down our phones
and just listen.

Lou Ventura lives in Olean, NY. His poetry and prose have appeared in several publications including The Worcester Review, English Journal, Sledgehammer, and Sein und Werden. His poetry collection, Bones So Close to Telling, is published by Foothill
Publishing.