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

 

 

Turning Home

for Amy and Jeb

September 6, 2014 

That story about a boy she knew

when they were young,

writing his name in cursive,

wishes breathed over birthday candles
renumbered year by year, 

like houses we pass on highways

holding life in those rooms,

meals and laughter and song—

there were endings, 

lives that rose and rose,

not the expected or planned

but what came instead,

spoken in the backwards glance

 

where we find the constant, a first self

before variations overlaid the theme

like copies of a lost original

stored in diaries gathering dust. 

Here is the music we danced to,

melodies that linger after the music’s gone,

the way love has lingered

in the silence of time. 

We want essential sounds that still make sense,

to be stories in themselves

the way we’re always telling stories

like old movies 

about a boy who holds her people, her street,

familiar and known—

the way we’re always and always

turning home.

 

                                                                                                     Cheryl Emerson
                                                                                                                            In gratitude
                                                                                                                            for friends like family