| ALL THIS LOVE by Jared Pearce Computer ChessI keep clicking undo to trace my losing streak, to find outall my mistakes. If I go another way, if I had allowed my brotherto tag along more often, or if I had not lied to my friends to protect my embarrassment,or if I had been more subtle or more striking, would the children be happy then? And with her,what could I have done better to love? I’m not sure I can find my way past those bishopsof self-deceit or the surprising leap from revelatory knights to hold that Queenso she’ll see me and want me. I’m always back at the game’s beginning, fretting over the pawns of dietand so many hours slept, holding dear to my rooks for the endgame— the end that comes no matterhow far back I go or how much I can erase of where I started or how I got here. All this LoveShe’s working to remove the grass, the grass I’ve worked to grow and green, the welcome mat I’m holding out to God, she wants turfed for flowers,a giant stone, and when I arrive I see her cutting the yard into patches, rubbing her sore wrist from mining the clover. She hopes I’m not angry becauseshe loves me, she says, she wants me to rip my lawn in half, she wants a thousand hours of care sacrificed at her delphinium altar, she’s willing to wait two hoursfor me to finish knifing my weekend bits to a rubbish pile. It takes me a little longer because I’ve got to pick the grubs out the roots and feed them to the robins. CuttingOne would have her leg hacked, another an arm— such appendages seem easy to divide. But others went for fashion: buttocks and trim the thighs, or my head must be ten percent my body mass. And some for bits to cheat loss by removing every other toe, one ear, the incisors, hair.Until she said her too big breasts, worthless lobes, too in-the-way, too defining, the two great balls chaining me to womanhood, making me a sex—these stones strapping me in a drowning when what I want is to be held with a light grace, apart from what I am or am not. Dad’s Staying at My Home (1)Before breakfast I’m listening beside the curtains: Birds, I say, out at the feeder; a couple, maybe. Quite a few, Dad says. He pours milk on his porridge and in a bite halves his toast.He has explained he knew, when my aunt died, that he could pull her back from beyond the veil drawn over her irrevocable blue eyes, but he also knew God had stopped him cold.I don’t remember if I told him I had a vision— if it had mattered that I had seen the face of God, that at one point I, too, had touched back my mind’s drapery and counted every sparrow. Dad’s Staying at My Home (3)When he slips between rooms, he tips on the light switch, does what he sees he had wanted, and then leaves, the room blazing like seventh heaven through the winter.As a youth I was vigilant to keep those unused lights dead—Dad had economized the California darkness, pared-down my wasteful flicks, until I was a Tarzanswinging from circuit to circuit. Now I tread on the light he wings sparking the house with electric bolts. Look up, boy, he says, and the miniature angels burrow into my brains. About the Author:  Jared Pearce’s poems have recently been or will soon be shared in Aji, Wilderness House, Triggerfish, Valley Voices, and Your Impossible Voice. The Annotated Murder of One, his first collection, was released from Aubade Press last year (www.aubadepublishing.com/annotated-murder-of-one). |