by Laurie Klein
It stops me. Inside
Timothy’s run-down clock
framed with carved oak leaves,
there is a silenced bird. I picture
the smaller dial of his watch,
his last minutes among us.
Of which I won’t speak.
Except, I have dreams
where a ghost holds out
scarred arms. Remorse razors open
the old Whys
and a plea stutters to life
which neither sutures my pain nor
jumpstarts his pulse.
Once, he flaunted
my grandmother’s pincushion, worn
like a wrist corsage: an acorn
of brown felt blind-stitched
around a palmful of sand. The band
snapped over the narrow place
where his tendons flexed. Picture
aid, bristling with pins. Twice, he pierced
his thigh—random stabs—dared me
to join him. Is this how
madness begins? I remember
nicked skin over his median nerve,
giddiness coursing through him, until
one day, he chose his radial artery:
time, measured in blood moving away
from his heart in a single direction.
His action, one-way.
The spurting junction.
How can it be, my friend keeps taking
his life? Over and over I see it, wish
I had visited more. Telephoned.
Texted. Prayed, even fasted.
To the guilty in sackcloth,
regrets have no scissors,
no thread: only pangs
of hem-less ache,
an unraveling
absence,
knots.
If I restart his clock,
will the little bird sing?
Among human carpal bones
there is only one
roughly shaped like an acorn. It hunkers
within a tendon—yours, mine,
his, decomposing now.
Thimble-small, that bone in the living
can still reverse a sinew’s pull:
I open my fist to prove it; twenty-seven bones
unable to save him. Dare I
nudge the pendulum?
Shift the weighted chains:
One pine cone goes up, the other
descends. Tick, tock . . . I am left
with hidden triune joints
that flex my grip, then its release, aided by
salty bursae that cushion
the human hand in motion,
like a glove of mercy. Seems
I already carry little pillows of tears.
Laurie Klein is the author of two collections, Where the Sky Opens and House of 49 Doors: Entries in a Life. Winner of the Merton Prize and Pushcart nominee for her prose as well as poetry, her work has appeared in Brevity, SWWIM, The Southern Review, MAR, Terrain, and elsewhere. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Emerge Literary Journal 