Round Drain, Round Glasses
Posted by Jillian Blackwell | Filed under '11 Fall: An Opiate Utopia, Poetry, Print
I am standing in the bathtub
Crying.
I think about how bathtubs as of late have been yellow
And how contrary that is to my thoughts in them,
That leap from my eyes unnoticed.
My toes tip toward the drain
The water streams down into the dark
A place for forgotten things.
We couldn’t forget that dark void,
Though we tried
We all walked around it
But my mother would ask questions of the empty,
Yelling across the space as if she hoped to be an echo
We only heard echoes.
I don’t remember that year,
Only a faint ringing in my ears
My mother would ask questions of the empty
The dips of her skin coupling her mouth making parenthesis to indicate she only asked in a whisper
So that my brothers and I would only think it a lullaby
Or song jumbling through her thoughts
Lining her day with a murmur
I think we knew.
My father would love that he’s become something of a song.
He played instruments like chess
Would pull me into his chest
His bass humming through me
My memory of his voice is a shout out the front door
He had glasses round like a question, tortoise-shelled,
Weeping from slender earpieces.
They were as heavy as I imagine his thoughts to be.
I imagine what his thoughts would be sometimes.
How he would hum his lips while thinking of me.
I only rarely think about the crook of his elbow,
Where my hand would be on a softly lit day,
I in a white dress and
He waist deep in memories.
I only rarely think of that.
I more often think about what his face looked like,
Find that I remember the half-finished drawing I made of him better than his actual face,
The drawing only his round glasses, his brow folded in thought, his eyes not looking at me.
I used to whisper my own questions.
At night in my bed, with my ceiling as a canvas for thought
I knew every dip of shadow,
How the blind-stripes would chase across its surface
As my worries dovetailed with my prayers.
I asked
Let everything work out.
I don’t really know why that’s what I asked for,
When it obviously had not.
Let everything work out.
What did I mean?
My dark ceiling taught me that an entity can be the same even as light and shadow fall across it
And that God will always be listening if you think he is.
I’ve decided now
That if I am ok with how life turns me
Then everything will always work out.
I am standing in the bathtub
Crying.
And If I don’t say anything, nothing will echo.
If I don’t talk in the morning, my words won’t settle
Around my feet
And If I don’t speak his name, then it will never fall like the leaves have been recently.
Stay
Posted by Jillian Blackwell | Filed under Poetry, Print
“So, what is permanent?” you ask.
I curl my toes around the edge of your kitchen chair,
Duck my head between my up-drawn knees.
“Nothing”
I say.
We spend most of our time kissing
Our foreheads together
Eyelashes skimming skin
Fingers trailing over ribs
“It’s only been three days,”
you say.
We sat on your front porch in the night
Looking over the overgrown garden
Leaves of a small tree trembling in the quiet wind
Halogen light dividing your face into shadow and ocher
You kept drawing your chair closer to mine
And I kept pulling my knees into my chest.
“One day, I want to live in a house that has a porch that goes all the way around. Well, maybe not all the way around.
At least three sides.”
I said.
You pull your chair closer to mine.
You are framed by the yellow wall of the kitchen behind you.
Your knees make parentheses around me.
I turn my eyes away and press my cheek to my knee.
“Everything ends,”
I say.
We huddle in the pool of flowers that is your bedspread and hide from time.
Legs intertwined like hands
Hands intertwined like expectation and disappointment.
You brush my hair out of your eyes.
“Stay in Philadelphia”
you say.
