X Marks the Heart
My best friend called his former wife his “X”
as if, by divorcing her, he’d rendered her
to a box on a tax form that only needed
an X, or had to be left blank, which is how he felt
about his X, Mary. She lived a mile from
him, on a cul-de-sac, second from last,
a two-story ranch with four bedrooms,
an expansive porch that faced a creek
demarcating the back property. They’d
lived there for decades, long enough
to raise two children, send them off
to college, long enough for him to be
sick of her constant complaints—
his forgetfulness, his socks being left
inside out, his leaving the checkbook
unbalanced. Maybe X was what he’d
done for years whenever she’d snap,
“Do you know how to turn off the lights?”
He blotted her off the page, not even
turning to acknowledge her. It was as if
he’d typed a line in a letter before computers
could obliterate a wrong word or a phrase
poorly said, by hitting one key xxxxx
to x it out. His X. Not love OOO,
not kisses XXX, Maybe he doesn’t
wonder why, when I talk to Mary,
she calls him David and speaks
with a certain nostalgia for the days
they were a family. Maybe for him
it’s all about cutting off a quarter
of his life like amputating a limb,
like wishing away the guilt he
can’t dispel, his unlove as a way
outside himself, an attestation
to his being free to not love,
a X to mark a life he can’t let go.
All the Dead
daffodils, their blossoms wilted,
curled like frail stick legs of the dying.
How many of them a week ago
made pedestrians stop and gawk?
I feel a remorse well deep inside
me as deep as the descants
of whales. Whatever bent them
down, told them “it’s finished”
seems not right. I had scooped a hole
six inches deep and dropped them
bulb by blub expecting exuberance—
the swell and root riot, the stem and blush
of yellow, white-yellow, orange-pink,
doubled, singled, efflorescence
my only thought, not this slack I’m-
done-with-this. It must be a mistake—
this abrupt end, its mute undeniability,
it’s-over. They drop all pretense of loveliness,
one day, and the next, they’re done. Even
earthworms make faint staccato sounds
grieving, letting each other know on
the drenched road in their suicidal
squirming to escape the waterboarding
plips of rain. I pick them up, coiled
muscular knots and slip them back to
earth, denying death as best I can
like it wasn’t even mentioned,
never part of God’s plan.
Bruce Spang, former Poet Laureate of Portland, is the author of two novels, The Deception of the Thrush and Those Close Beside Me. His most recent collection of poems, All You’ll Derive: A Caregiver’s Journey, was just published. He’s also published four other books of poems, including To the Promised Land Grocery and Boy at the Screen Door (Moon Pie Press) along with several anthologies and several chapbooks. He is the poetry and fiction editor of the Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. His poems have been published in Connecticut River Review, Puckerbrush Review, Café Review and other journals across the United States. He teaches courses in fiction and poetry at Ollie at University of North Carolina in Asheville and lives in Candler, NC with his husband Myles Rightmire and their five dogs, five fish, and thirty birds.