On Solitude
What can only be a perfect phrase, hurried on the back of a receipt, subsequently caught in the wind & flown forever away. Your eyes are not what they were, imperfect & especially in the morning before gravity once more proves us little. First to sit in the reglazed tub, its waters rise to where you like it, the soap curled in a thin line against the body. An image no less important than the next & that life—betrayal, collapse, etcetera—belongs to someone else, an acquaintance at best. No one can read what’s written, not even the cow standing over the wet scrap of paper, a tangle of grass hanging from her mouth.
At the Sound of Goodbye
Because for the moment I believe this world & I have made amends, I leave next to the napkin my fortune unread, a generous tip, the pen used to sign my own name. It’s useful even so to locate the feeling, the where in the what & where of our bodies, the subsequent arrival of the day when it takes a second or two to remember the last time you cried. You celebrate instead the highwire triumph of the squirrel, the cracks from which the greens arrive & the trees still unpacking their smells. Brand new, or at least to me & I hadn’t planned on my father, down from the hillside, stopping by to ask whether I’m well, to let me know that he loves me yet, that he listened as I coaxed my loneliness into the fields, knelt close & whispered, You’ve been such a good, good boy.
Tipping the Apple Cart
I spend half the morning in the home improvement store. A million decisions every day & back home, just outside, we poured the food into the green bowl & here it’s gone. Years later, some of the rooftops still covered in tarps. We’ve been told there’s a beach not so very far, that if you time it right it’s very good for shelling. I carried this furniture one thousand forty-nine miles to Louisiana & immediately put out to pasture. There we’ll see goat, we’ll see a little cow, & into the strange distance we’ll meet a family who keep as pets a quartet of ducks. After the hurricane, they say that no one who fled ever quite made it back.
Michael Robins is the author of five collections of poetry, including People You May Know (2020) and The Bright Invisible (2022), both from Saturnalia Books. He lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he teaches in the MFA program at McNeese State University and serves as Editor of The McNeese Review.
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