Benjamin Gorman's Shared Poems

Feel time's brutal press
like an ill-fitting garment:
proof we're eternal.

It’s an old house
brick, hardwood floors, high ceilings
the way they used to be made

We make small changes
some of the floors have been sanded
walls repainted

We satisfy our lust for modernity
haul in our modern conveniences:
refrigeration, clothes washing

The old hermit crab dies
or wanders off,
the new one moves in

We take over the shell
still of use
and we always in need

Things get passed down
or on, or across
direction in this game is sometimes unclear

But we never forget
it is easier to reuse
than rebuild

While I read,
one hand,
looking for something to do,
busies its fingers on my forehead.
Fingers are curious, restless,
always testing, exploring.
They caress subtleties of skin
probe a landscape of bone beneath:
ridges of polished stone clothed in snug wrappings.
Here are form and façade,
structure and veneer.

Ape brains abuzz,
we are curious too—
but fear sets limits:
skeletons dismay us,
ours carefully buried
in flesh that captivates and enthralls us.
We mistrust their hidden engineering
erector set beneath pretty dressing;
we doubt the bones’ intentions,
cringe at their mechanical demands,
worry at their subterranean pains.
Our usual curiosity stops
at deeply buried things—
sub-cellar foundations,
dark-shrouded mysteries
and the ponderous
roots of things.

Robin be hoppin’
an’ poppin’ an’ bobbin’
an’ shiftin’ an’ shufflin’ the leaves by the snow.

Snowman be slumpin’
an’ droopin’ an’ drippin’
an’ slidin’ an’ meltin’—got somewhere to go.

Blue sky be peekin’
an’ creepin’ an’ sneakin’
an’ actin’ like he gonna put on a show.

Springtime be draggin’
an’ whinin’, complainin’
an’ sayin’ he ain’t gonna do it no mo’.

Me, I be itchin’
an’ fussin’ an bitchin’
an’ growlin’ an’ jonesin’ for winter to blow.

I didn’t watch the snow falling.
I knew the forecast,
wished I could muster the child’s delight
to watch falling snow,
but I could not be bothered;
or so I told myself.

There is something sinister
about falling snow,
as it whitens the black asphalt streets
fills them with a silence like death,
smoothes all creases,
gradually erases cracks and contours.

Forgive me, it’s my age, my generation,
but I think of our cold war era nightmares,
thermonuclear annihilation,
the flash of reason sublimated into madness:
it is too like the imagined fall of ash
the ash of all things transmuted to powder.

So instead I emerged afterward from my basement room
to see a new white world,
a cold white blanket on a cold earth;
this ineluctable silence,
this quiet, this white patience:
the peace at the end of things.