Mary
Whittemore
teaches creative writing at an independent school in Dayton,
Ohio. Her work
has been published in several literary journals,
including The English Journal and Off the Map.
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Earthly
Love II
Mary
Whittemore
I
have burdened you with the trust
of decoding my silence. All summer
I had stories of things I didn't want to say.
When memories move in suddenly,
unexpectedly, you tire in their
refragmentation of the present.
You are too aware how this moment
may later crowd the simple act of being
somewhere else.
As if spending days
counting series of lasts were not enough, my father
listened to a speech from his childhood. He remembered
thinking German tanks might troop down his street
and take him away. He stares as he listens,
lonely like it is the P.A. system in his
elementary school. Like it is so many things.
This is always what's at stake.
What to do if it comes and wondering what to do
when it does. I'll tell you about the handgun I'm
afraid my father will use because he has seen
tumors become the size of a small universe.
I'm not asking for your interpretation to be mine—
even when death makes us want to name something
we can always need.
But the silence wedged in between
our small comments about what we see—
even when memory is busy labeling two unrelated things
the same. The blank look across the same river.
The nothing in your hand,
this means everything.
© 2001 by
Mary Whittemore
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