Poetry Magazine, Len Roberts, February 2003

Poetry Magazine

Len Roberts

USA

The List of 
Most Difficult Words

I was still standing although
Gabriella Wells and Barbara Ryan were too, 
their bodies dark against the wall of light 
that dull-pewter December afternoon, 
shadows with words that flowed
so easily from their mouths, 
fluorescent and grievous,  
pied and effervescent,
words I'd spelled out to the rhythm 
of my father's hoarse whispers 
during our nightly practice sessions
beneath the dim bulb,
superfluous, excelsior,
desultory and exaggeration
mixed with his Schaefer breath
and Lucky Strike smoke

as I went down 
The List of Most Difficult Words 
with a man whose wife had left,
one son grown into madness,
the other into death, 
my father's hundred and five-pound skeleton 
of skin glowing in that beer-flooded kitchen 
when he'd lift the harmonica

to blow a few long, sad riffs
of country into a song
while he waited for me to hit
the single l of spiraling, 
the silent i of receipt,
the two of us working words hard
those nights on Olmstead Street,
sure they would someday save me.

Talking on the Telephone

Thirty years later I try to remember
the telephone number back on Olmstead Street,
see the black base and speaker I took
into the cold hallway those long winter
nights I talked to all the girls
I loved.  Inside the warm kitchen
my mother and father whispered,
now and then the click of dishes
set into the sink, the pop
as the top snapped off another Schaefer's
bottle, but out there it was wind
drafting under the front door, finding
its way up the stairs to where I would sleep,
wind coming in from the back, too, down
the long corridor with its one dim light.
Hello Mary, hello Suzanne, Dee Dee
with the blue angora sweater, how are you
tonight, I wish you were here, and then
the Drifters started to sing "Save
the Last Dance for Me," my feet
moving in time against the dark wallpaper,
my nose and hands chilled, becoming numb
while their voices flowed into my warm ear.