Arsenic Lobster
poetry journal |
Issue Twenty-one Winter 2009 |
Silent, Upon a Peak Matt Gillespie When I am awake, it is the picture of us over my desk, that keeps me there, that soaks the room in cold, clear illumination. Look down and judge me, run me through with dense, desolate memories. My mom, Polish orphan - sadness must feel self-indulgent. My dad, fourth kid of seven - Grand-dad would have been on his third gin by this time on a Sunday morning. Three of us at the Hotel Bel Air - two million miles due west of Illinois. This is Father’s Day, 2005: the last Father’s Day in the history of the world. The day that life placed you, for once, on the telling end of the joke. Let us eat our eggs in peace amongst the dripping wet playboys and pajama-clad debutantes. In twenty days, you will be dead and the Church will consign you to a most holy limestone filing cabinet that rises a thirty nine feet over the granite gravestones of your elders. It’s your eyes, the ones that filled with glass that Sunday, when I learned that to perform CPR, you break every rib in the human body; that you have to burn the village to try and save the kingdom – It’s the eyes now, that I see, only the glass is gone. How do you still teach me when you’re dead? Your bones are dust, your words are air. This is the memory that holds me awake with the foamy white gleam and cold azure sting of saltwater. The name you gave to me is Matthew John Gillespie. I’m 22 now. My pale Illinois feet are naked as they curl into the bright white sands outside Santa Cruz. You didn’t see the Pacific ‘til you were fifty-one years old. |
About Matt Gillespie |