He loves these make-believe moments in the morning
when everyone pretends to forget the night before.
His wife, June, in her green dress gathering up papers
before heading into the office. His daughter,
cross-legged in front of the TV, a cartoon sponge
dancing on its plasma screen. Outside in the snow,
the flutelike whistle of an oriole hearkens the coming sun.
Too early and too cold for Janey to wait at the bus stop,
so they squeeze into this shared space like a mouse
pressing beneath a door jamb. For just a moment,
he almost believes that this snapshot, this image
pulled from Better Homes & Gardens,
is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but.
But then he notices that the papers
June is fiddling with need no organizing,
that Janey, still as a cemetery monument,
has resurrected the teddy bear she’d outgrown
years before, and a question slithers
through his torso, through the gaps
between organs, those spaces
without names. The unanswerable Why?
whose tail he can never quite grab.
With each tick of the wall clock’s metronome
resentment stacks another block
within his throat, a tower that begs
every black thought to climb up and leap out.
Knowing a mind can fracture
into a thousand-piece puzzle
whose seams refuse to snap together again
never stops the picture from shattering,
knowledge buzzing like a mosquito in his head.
Buzz buzz buzz
and then that familiar stab
into a juicy bit of amygdala.
He launches off the couch, screams,
stabs the air, wields the prongs of his blame
like a pitchfork.
When all he loves has emptied
from the house, when the drum of blood
has slowed its cadence to a crawl and silence
rolls over him like a fog, memory will rise
like a zeppelin nosing toward a black clouded bank,
toward everything
he’s tried so hard to forget.