Marty’s dead and gone and we want to ask,
“Where?” We are a two-year-old whose ball
has rolled under the couch: We’ve not yet
acquired object-permanence for loved ones
or anyone. We flip through pages of photo
albums and screens, rehearse stories, sow
memories in the mind like a planter casts
seeds, scattering. Marty is a revenant, a
relic, a spoonful of atoms reorganized as
a marker for Marty to parry a darkness, a
calculation error not able to be fixed by
acrylic, glass fiber, or any acrobatic of
mind. Math is perfect but dead. Words are
shadows that mime shadows on a wall. What
we want is Marty back, and the space that
he used to fill, but space is finite, and
meanwhile a new tenant has just moved in.
David Ruekberg (M.F.A., Warren Wilson) is a poet, teacher, and climate activist in Rochester, NY. His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Borderlands, Cimarron Review, Lake Effect, and elsewhere. His books include Where Is the River Called Pishon? (Kelsay Books 2018) and Hour of the Green Light (FutureCycle Press 2021).
Image: “Hills Somewhere” by Laura Knowlton
Pine Hills Review 