poem for:

Elizabeth Walztoni

I can count out my life in three 
or seven cities, 
looking down the various alleys of
remembering. I try to keep myself private
since tears already leak from my left eye
all the time. 
in the right world there is no trace of
us the way we were.

I'm still waiting for a visit from my grandfather, the
detective who died digging a hole with
no fear of his bad heart. There is his good deed, magnifying
cracks in the glass until they split. I see him drive
out of Chicago while the
grass is green but the trees
aren't. Their limbs hold corners of
winter and the unfolding wings of a 
heron against the light and 
my own wet eyes in September. 

The sky falls grey and man's 
folly, or whatever you call it, imagination 
loses itself in the fields along the road but
always returns. Across his shoulders this 
and the name of the world. 

Back in the alley where the sun went I'll 
take it, I will, I'll pick up the call and
smile my way through it. This becomes
the limit of what we say about the place, and 
if you don't mind, 
I'm closing my left eye now.

---

Elizabeth Walztoni’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Black Stone/White Stone, New Note Poetry, sunthia magazine, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She is a fiction reader for Sepia Quarterly and a 2020 Nature in Words Fellow at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute. Find her on Twitter @EWalztoni.

Previous

Next