Open During Construction

restaurants, condo towers, single lane detours
locals can’t afford after Airbnb
traffic in nervous contractions
and all of us late for appointments.

the Women’s Clinic website warning: “Bless Our Mess!”
smells of sawdust latex ultrasound
thick booted workers paint spattered hammers
eyes fixed on the carpet, awkward where women in various stages
                                                                                                             wait.

Waiting was long and muffled.
I readreadread,
sorting sounds, subdued,
something urgent in the next room
sotto voce like a hotel TV

                                                 (“no story possible, just the voices”)

box of complimentary pads beside the bed, a poorly placed mirror,
rectangle windows high up only squirrels or birds could see
what? and who would they tell?
specimen cut of winter branches sample slides
suggest the whole tree, winter, white…

… wondering how the old fellow fared last night, in 10-degree chill?
said on the bus he’d rather die than go to the shelter,
said he’d been to prison & the army & he “wan’t goin’ no shelter,”
he said, walked away, gets dark early this time of year…

the nurse is younger than my daughter
repeats the litany questions
tries to laugh knowingly.

the phlebotomist is au courant draws blood whispers while the tube fills:
That there’s the toilet paper roller, other side o’the wall. Like nails on a chalkboard
hearin that all day. And them men, they’re nearly done thank god.
Last week one of ‘em was caught peekin in on an exam.
The other men, they brung him outside and … (sssh!) “took care of it”, you know.
He was reassigned.

the book in hand, Erín Moure, Furious, “The Acts 14. ‘It is impossible to
conceptualize …’” (98).

October

“Everything’s there
As part of the comical study
Of how to love time.”
                               – Lisa Robertson, “Earth in Lucretius”


At last! I found where the ice cream truck lives
at a small cottage house on Sweet Home Road
where the Emperor sleeps after chores until dawn
with mechanical music stuffed in his head.

I’ll post a picture if you don’t believe me.
That’s the name of the road, for real!

I heard him out late and followed
past dusk, past the Shwarma stand,
and the Free Parking lot all blocked off,
the Episcopal Church with flags half-mast

(remembering . . .
Las Vegas? Galicia?
Mogadishu? Myanmar? . . .)

“Stranglers of peace don’t eat ice cream.”

(The Emperor won’t let them –
I just know that he won’t.)

No children were chasing the truck last night,
no running around streets past dark.
But I can do as I please, at my age, by stealth
I followed the Emperor of Ice Cream.

Why was he out in October?
Ice cream is a summer month.
It always has been, as everyone knows.
But I learned he was just going home.

It was too dark to see, when he stepped off the truck,
too bad, but I waved nonetheless
for all of those years down all of those streets
where the coins in our pockets were somehow
       enough.


                                                                                   Cheryl Emerson
                                                                                   October, 2017

Requiems

news that youth
did not survive
itself
                    becoming
into head-
shots as if
                even dead

could see itself

avenged,

While others

privately
                           so
unexpectedly
                              ghost

their families

sooner than ghosting

        arrives. 

                                    C.Emerson

                                                                                                  October, 2014

The Fiction of Immensities of Time and Space

                           “Strange plan: why this abundance of finality?”

                                                    --Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Passivity Course Notes (129).

Narrowings,

what can never not have happened

caught in nets
of autonomous nerves

doing what they do.

Mornings are cold.
Blankets make a small pocket

for feet.

I stay a little longer,
pocketed and small.

What was the plan?
Something about waiting.

The carpet is thick now,
patterns lost or about to appear.

The weaves loosen at night,

Arabian carpets
higher than mortars,

or prayer rugs
bringing stories for children.

Best not to interpret.
Tugging at threads

could start a whole unravelling.

You want the knots to hold,
tangled for a reason:

to live in awe of the indestructible.

Crumbled buildings  
draw skylines

that even in rubble
hold their place.

Adumbrations speak
the shape of happenings,

catastrophes of birth

and remembrance

cohere

better than abundant endings,
restless nights,

more presence than we can possibly imagine

ceaselessly here
and so long ago.

                                                                                     C.Emerson

                                                                                     September, 2014