POETRY
Etch Me Upon the Glass
a free verse poem
Sometimes when you leave, you gather everything quietly into bags, not suitcases.
You gather what you can.
No lingering goodbye at the door, just a sob-strewn stumble, out, a shadow swallowing the sun.
The floorboards release your weight one last time and you wonder if anyone will etch your name
anywhere, anyplace it might belong like on their hearts or memories or at least in the bellies of dreams.
If you etch me on the glass, you can hang me under the deadened tree where the birds used to sing for me. The cowbirds
with their brown heads might look for a place to leave their young but I leave nothing behind.
Not even my face, etched into glass, arranged into triangles, tinkling on their strings.
I can’t find my shoes. I have only one of one pair and twos of others and some of them have mold fuzzing up the soles and all I want is the crying tree on the ridge. Just one pass of the fat raccoon and I think I can go on. I am sure that tree remembers me.
I haven’t figured out yet where the sun comes up here. Such is the price of sleeping with a cat on your chest and a dog snuggled up beneath the only blanket you own, right up next to the soft flesh of your thigh where no hand ever roams and you forget to shave and the roundness is now a wiggle. It is of no matter.
I am freedom, etched in glass and I am stoic and celebration and routine and wounds and I have carried myself here with a busted-up car and a prayer.
Let the cowbirds remember me. They too leave a piece of themselves behind and selfishly, evolutionarily some might say, they’re set free.
My face is etched on glass; such is the way of things. Kaleidoscope triangles tinkling on their strings.
Thank you for reading my first post in Scrittura. This poem was written as a response to J.D. Harms’ prompt: “frustrated history.”