Part II of tonight’s double feature. Maybe they’ll like this better.
Faithful
by Rob Rice
You get to know the size of a room best
As you’re sweeping it
You feel it’s mapped flat and physical
So hardtop obvious
They kept a bazillion records of faithful people
Acting accordingly Models
of interpreted force and lust built like water
An ice monument melts in a pond and the water surrounding it becomes unswimmable
And irresistible you feel it inside your ribs between beats
“I hope it isn’t much longer”
Captured in real cassette tape
That inert sound it makes
Scudding your thumb across
We have a strong blood together knowing
The microwave makes the milk flag
Where the dream starts
At the verge of the room
Toeing over to bed and getting in with you
It’s a dream of a little girl
Standing skewed on cement at the right edge
Of a flat slab room
The moon shining in through crossbar windows
Exaggerated and loose
The only light and it makes a spectacle of her shadow
Pure long black and creeping up towards the wall
Getting faster
Until it whips around and out
The car passing
And the dream gone with it
The thing with death is
It’s forever right away
There’s a tree in Maine
Much like the others around it
Medium sized and just grey
And that’s all that can really be said of it
Other people’s work
Featured in other people’s work
Is hard to fault
Failing dissertations
Even using moon samples
But about before, the tree
The hard part it’s like you feel it in your teeth or appraise it there
There’s some function that deems things edible that it engages
And no, it’s too hard
We’re bonded by the ways in which we’re mutually disadvantaged
A nook in space we share bother in and warm
I saw personality templates
Reused out
near Nash Cabins
Who could think of anything else while
passing Pond and Gendreau
in Naples Maine
near the school at Songo Locks
Lauded hub tangle of great northern docks
Unenthusiastically buoying the day trip of stumbling émigrés
Dusting off their laps
A confused and joyous congregation of cars
At the Gagne family home and place of business
In simple unperverted well drilling
For clean water by men who don’t mix their velleity and concupiscence
But about before, the tree
It’s so calm and androgynous
Inaccessible but somehow
Warm enough in the winter
Holding its breath until the huge spring exhalation of leaves
The silent relief
Release that lines the scenic route
Itself a gentle reprieve
From the highway
Where an engine inhales a half-mile
