Alienated Parent
Fall of Icarus, Matisse
by Michael Steffan
When Liz my neighbor weeps I tell her to stand
over the planter with the elephant ears.
I tell her she’s going to throw the weatherman’s
rainfall predictions off
another inch this year. I tell her about
the five-string pearl necklace made from the tears
of a good soul, all 259 beads
laid out in the glowing case in the museum.
I tell her Noah’s going to have to get
the lumber and his adze out. A gasp
of perspective with a little laugh breaks
the intense fit of her grief. Her brow lifts.
Her fingers rake through bewildered hair.
Her ex, Wendell, has turned their two grown kids
Ed and Rita cross-armed and frowning against her.
They will not answer her voicemails or texts
or even like her red-heart loves on Facebook
under the pics of her grandchildren. She hasn’t pressed
their rosy cheeks against hers in nearly a year.
Her look drains with remoteness.
I imagine another peer in the museum
from the night watchman as his gaze is drawn
luxuriously into the glass case at the jewels
strung from the diamond clasp on the dark felt
of a neck and breast under the head piece.
Sorrow has that charm to make of us
fixating objects of sight for ornamentation.
“But we do live in time,” my therapist
reminds me. “Our professionalized society
drives us to be so goal oriented, we hardly
process our feelings for the tender of their blooms.”
In a weird dream that night Liz’s head floats
in an unblinking beam of light in black space
hovering in front of me. Her eyes flutter open,
the lashes rimmed with dew, streaking with sighs. —
An invisible up-swung hand clutches my heart
as I wake, jackknifed, squirming from my blankets.
On his office sofa I let it all spill out for Doctor Paige
who asks about the backstory with Liz’s children.
“These rejections for their mother must be rending.”
Wendell in recovery has matured after all
these years beyond his union’s enabling stronghold.
He’s spun a story of his own now about how
she connived to keep him capsuled in those pills
to justify her “afternoon appointments.”
“He told Ed and Rita I was cheating on him!”
Liz’s sobs start up again, summonsing anew
dark clouds over the fence between our lawns.
I’ve already changed my shirt once today.
Still I reach across to comfort her with a hug.
In the faster clutch of my neighbor’s desperation
the spears on the pickets dig into my ribs.
I can see from here their bruises tomorrow
in the bedroom mirror, with its beveled edges
of ever and after, as we live in time.
Michael (Todd) Steffen’s poetry has appeared in journals, including The Boston Globe, spoKe, The Dark Horse, Nixes Mate, The Exacting Clam, and Ibbetson Street. Boris Dralyuk (editor of Nimrod Journal) writes, Steffen’s lines are supple and wear their unmistakable wisdom lightly. His third collection, I Saw My Life, was released this April by Lily Poetry Review Press [lilypoetryreview.blog/i-saw-my-life-by-michael-steffen/].
