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SIX DAYS’ LAMENT by Joe Wilkins

October 1, 2010 Contributed By: Joe Wilkins

I think I disagree that there is a quantum leap between living and non-living.
—George Church, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School

So at nineteen he gave his life to God,
& now—hands slippery as fish, skin
pocked & spotted, beard
falling, simply falling from his face—
he asks about that girl I knew, the one
who sat next to me in his honors lit,
who when we were both nineteen
& drinking at some ridiculous college party
fell three stories
& broke below,
on the sidewalk. I remember
he had us reading then the Inquisitor,
though when I came to see him
at the Jesuit House we didn’t
speak of it. (How will you live? Aloysha asks.
                                        How will you love them? With such a hell
in your heart & in your head?)
& neither do we now. Speak, that is,
of love, this pause, my pause, falling
awkwardly between us. She’s good,
I finally tell him. She’s in a home,
                                        has a job answering phones
at a lawyer’s office in the afternoon.
                                        Then takes her pills, sees her movie,
is asleep religiously by seven.
Like stuck birds banging at a pane
of dirty glass, his old lips flap.
                                        I wouldn’t want he says,
to live like that. & days later just like that
he is dead, or down far enough that river road
of lotus flowers some dichotomist named him
dead & dead & dead forever. See, it was
happening: years ago, he’d have never
said a thing like that. Or the way that day
he spoke & closed his cloudy eyes,
then woke & spoke again—about this time
something else entire. The way even now
she sometimes says my name, & in her blue eyes
birds take wing—
though a moment later her face
goes slack, then spastic. It’s happening:
for eighty years that brilliant, godwracked man
falling into the bounds of his body:
for however many years she’ll ever have
that godblown girl holding
in her trembling, not-quite fist the phone:
or this one, God, this one I hold,
my six-day’s child, already
sloughing off his birthing skin.

 

Return to table of contents for Issue 3 Fall 2010

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: October 1, 2010

Further Reading

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Love, I can’t own you, but give me lunacy, at least. Let my last lunacy be your legacy, at least. Don’t cut all ties with me. Let me hate you and you hate me, at least. What shame in me being with you? If not in public, see me privately, at least. Go ahead, believe […]

We Are History: Ardor and Visibility in Robin Gow’s A Million Quiet Revolutions
by Katherine Fallon

Written in verse, A Million Quiet Revolutions queers both the novel and young adult genre by using altered form and subversive subject matter to break expected literary boundaries.

Feral by Deena Metzger

The moment it first occurred to the woman that she would bring the girl home was when the girl had climbed to a sturdy branch halfway up the sycamore and ensconced herself there, first removing, then dropping, her yellow leather work boots and then her socks, stretched out like lilies at their tops, fluorescent lime […]

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