You should have seen us scooching from the car
with our walkers, me from knee surgery, him
from the accumulations: the back, the hips.
By you I don’t mean anyone in particular, only
the you that means someone should be witness
to what happens! Witness to the tender return,
the determined positioning, the elevator ride.
Who would have thought, is another way to say it.
No high drama, no wailing wall, only the slow-
burning aches that bear our names and ride
to the third floor, where we head toward the door,
leaning like two pigeons caught in a wind, greeted
by Wally the cat on his back, his expanse of white
belly waiting to be rubbed if we could reach
down far enough. We both wish to inform you
that the situation has become absurd, absurd!
Surely you recall, we wish you to recall, Tarzan
and Jane calling out across the vines. Wild animal
thrills! Johnny Weissmuller, lock of hair across
his brow like an impulsive boy’s. Cavalier.
Who doesn’t love cavalier, and what lies under it,
the lone, the arch presentation? We’d like to
see you try it, yourself, with your two hands
on the walker’s handles! Watching to lift over
the dangerous oriental rug. Witness, now,
as your eyes must adjust to a fainter light, what
you’re in for: the unexplored, the ruins,
the behemoth and leviathan. Good God, the cooling
of magma beneath the forest floor, the mad
crack in the earth’s mantle, and the small triangle
of the rug’s corner caught like a lapping tongue.
Fleda Brown’s The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems, was chosen by Ted Kooser for his University of Nebraska poetry series in 2017. She has nine previous collections of poems. Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her memoir, Driving With Dvorak, was published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. She now lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan, and is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington.
