Benjamin S. Grossberg
I rush home. Rags soaked in paint thinner lay
atop a half-finished bookcase. Did the cat
nuzzle them? The insufficiently navigated line
between unlikely and impossible. My father
sends an email: Call when you get this.
What good can follow? In one episode
of the Twilight Zone, a phone line falls across
a grave, sparking inside the earth. Miles away,
a widower’s phone rings. Then mine does: This
is Steve’s friend; he’s been in an accident. Between
too awful to contemplate and too awful not to:
twice I ask is he okay? after Amy promises
he is. I exhale into the receiver. An implosion
leapt lightly across, a chasm miles deep,
inches wide. But as if a letter I’d been carrying
had slipped from my pocket into its
occluded depth. Taken by a sudden fear,
I feel the air of my bedroom
turn sepulchral. My body temperature
plummeting, the cat springs away. What
could they have, my parents, but faith
that, side by side underground, bodies
can know and gain by fellowship? In an era
of cellphones, angels indistinguishable
from contrails engulf a satellite. Closets gape
like mouths. Between can’t happen
and must. I’d have a man here if I could,
perhaps, in a lucid moment, begging him not
to pass in his sleep, for fear of finding myself back
in the space I currently occupy. How awful
to be left alone with a body—like a mortician
working late—especially if that body’s your own.