Two Poems

Gillian Wegener

My Father Begins to Disappear

My father has no fat on his bones.
Blue veins run the lengths of his stringy muscles,
down his wrists and across his hands,
a foundering delta, a delta silting itself in and disappearing.
His hands are bone and skin, even the palms gone slack.
His nails are brittle and crack for no reason.
Every day there is less of him.
He used to say that when the time came, we should
set him adrift at sunset to find his own Valhalla.
We would laugh, say yes, of course. But now,
each day bringing that time closer, my father
says less and less. Even the words he wants to say
get caught on his tongue and lost...he shakes his head nevermind.
His hips hurt. Bruises don't heal. The house is never warm enough.
Home from a visit, I realize that I have barely spoken with him.
He's the shade in the corner, almost a photograph of himself,
almost a discrete set of memories. He's becoming past tense.
Dad on a swing in Cape Cod, blowing soap bubbles for me.
Dad running us around the house on his shoulders.
Dad dancing, pretend debonaire, in the kitchen.
Dad at his favorite marina, smiling,
not one of the docked boats behind him
prepared to take him aboard.

***

Her Bedroom, 1976

I think of Dickinson some mornings.
Her solitude.

Her solitude which was not loneliness.

The light, green in midsummer,
falls in the shape of window panes
across the rose coverlet of the bed.

Tidy. Hospital corners.
The linen across the bureau bleached white.

Branches of horse chestnut
clack and swish against the window.
Last year there was a bird's nest.

I think of Dickinson writing her poems,
locking them away.

The cool shape of the key in her hand.

I rearrange the frames on the bedside table.
Move a book. Smooth a pillow.

Dickinson...

Emily would have seen
the bird's nest too, would have kept watch
over the hungry lives there.

She too had to muster courage
to open her door and descend
into the work of her day.

Gillian Wegener has had poems appear in many publications, including Quercus Review, Sow's Ear, Packinghouse Review, and others. Her chapbook, Lifting One Foot, Lifting the Other, was published in 2001 by In the Grove Press, and her full-length poetry collection, The Opposite of Clairvoyance, was published in 2008 by Sixteen Rivers Press. Wegener won top honors in the Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2006 and 2007, and currently runs a monthly poetry reading series in Modesto.

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