Chuck Carlise is the author of the poetry collection In One Version of the Story (New Issues Poetry & Prose) and two prize-winning chapbooks: A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs and Casual Insomniac. His poems and essays can be found at Pleiades, Diagram, Southern Review, Nimrod, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and directs the Ashland Poetry Press.

Way Too Deep to Come Back 

 

“You came,” you said, “I can’t believe you came,”

Collapsed into the dust on Highway 1.

I sat with you, said, everything’s okay.

 

Two years (this week) your father passed away;

our fights these days, a constant background thrum.

(Do we both wonder to ourselves, why do I stay?)

 

You couldn’t save them both, you used to say:

Your mother’s boyfriend’s fist, your father’s drugs.

They couldn’t save themselves.         Look, it’s okay,

 

I’ll stay back if you want, I tried to say.

You hung up, then called back – something had sprung.

“Fuck you,” you said, “I can’t believe you’d say

 

you ever cared about me. Not today.”

Things stopped making sense, then you were done.

The phone went dead.  We’ll never be okay.

 

Love, I don’t know how to send these ghosts away.

Or how to bear these storms & not be stung.

You need me & I don’t know what to say.

So hours pass. You’re drunk & scared & drained.

You text for help, you’ve walked too far, “please come.”

When I find you in the weeds, you sob, “you came?”

 

No one held your hand through childhood flame.

No one ever found you when you’d run.

“You came,” you said, “I can’t believe you came.”

I held you there & lied, it’s all okay.

Estate Sale

 

Here, a wish bone necklace.

& there, a green banker’s lamp.

Fishnet pouch of bright plastic orbs.

Lace-fringed drapes.

A paisley foot-stool I wish we’d have bought.

 

Someone’s life in lots & dimes; everything

priced to move.

 

Trunk of French books bleached 

in LA sun.  A long green evening dress

to hug you like a stocking – velvet shadows

over your hips – the glamor you always wanted.

 

Slip it on over your jeans, roll back

your eyes like a southern belle.  I’ll snap 

a photo (hips, shadows).  You’ll slip it off

& shrug.

 

Our days were numbered, little bird. 

I wonder if either of us knew it,

picking through boxes & tabletop piles.

 

Here a set of votive candles,

there a cache of dry-pressed sage.

Flash-bulb cells; polaroid film.

We came with nothing, we’ll leave

with just this memory –

bleached, parsed – already dissolving 

as we climb into my car.

I’m glad I took the photo though.

 

Now that I don’t have you.

Nightstill

 

The colors of night are all tempered with blue—

     the darkness lying over our skin like a fluid,

like a stain of midnight ink in the mulch-grass shadows,

slick dampness of dew-soaked summer weeds

     as I roll onto my hip to face you.

You are stretched out in the grass,

searching for stars through Midwest clouds,

     eyes opening wide to this dim twilight,

     as my own are, looking for you beside me.

 

There is space around us, nothing in our hands.

& I want, more than anything, to dilate in this moment,

     to absorb, to realize every detail—

            the raspy white noise of wood-creaky crickets in distance,

            the rustle of your palm tracing absent circles in the sod,

            the chill of my ribs as moisture fingertips against skin;

this dark-slate sky around us

     the instant before you realize I’ve turned,

     before you lean to meet me:

            your face, almost visible, bluestained, radiant.

On its Way to Something Else

 

When my grandfather died, my mother knew 

before the doctors, before the exhale.  

Perched beside the bed, 

she felt him passing through

     like a ripple in the air, a cloud of ions, 

like steam.

 

One second he lay there, 

with sunken cheeks, one last tuft of hair;

then a gush through the aether

& that was that.

 

She didn’t say a word to the assembled siblings,

     flown in when the cancer took its turn,

     splayed around the room like a shelf of figurines:

seven there (of the ten), unsure, holding hands with spouses, 

keeping vigil with his wife

their mother, so shrunken it seemed,

     while they all felt so overgrown, so awkward,

     clumsy in their nervous breath – 

no one knowing what to do

(who ever does, just then?) staked in place, 

glancing around the room, until – 

     don’t say it (though they all know it will come),

     just keep still & everything stays the same.

 

Except that it doesn’t.

The shallow breathing, scratchy & short – eyes closed in coma,

machines long since shut down now – stops, hesitates a long moment,

then hiccups back into rhythm.  It happens once.  Twice.

     All eyes on the slow bubble of pulse at his neck

that keeps.  

         Until it doesn’t.

 

There’s no choice for how we remember such things.

My mother, already on her feet – dazed but sharp – hustling her mother

into the hallway before that final shivering breath;

understanding on instinct,

                             mom shouldn’t see this.

& I think of Kent standing witness 

at the crematorium as his father’s body suddenly jerks to life,

sits bolt upright (as they often do in the heat – 

     like waking from a vivid dream

     the neurons & pathways all pulsing once more in the oven’s sear);

his mother’d warned him not to go – it’s all you’ll remember, she said, 

that picture, his body, as though he were still in it – 

     he’s not.  

She was right, of course – half a century of Winston cigarettes & machine shop grease

no match (in memory) for that last wrenched pike, 

muscles slack, expressionless,

     before the flesh melts away.

 

The last air quakes from my grandfather’s failed lungs –

a “death rattle” we call it, 

really it’s just the muscles

finally letting go, emptying flat 

     in their suddenly cavernous cage of cartilage & ribs.

It’s jarring & loud, & those in the room who have never seen death

think maybe he’s trying for one more rallying kick.

But my mother – who would know the difference –

is hustling past couches & nurse stations,

     head still swimming in the outer space of his passing, 

that confusion of air still trembling her temples,

still throbbing like a breaking fever

 

“It was euphoric,” she’d tell me years later.  “There was nothing 

     left to worry about – no questions left to wonder”  

(her eyes glassy, drifting past to the doorjamb behind me)

“he knew everything, just then.  & that meant 

it was all okay.”

 

 

& admit, I love that part – 

the scattering of ecstatic relief, his body done 

     with its splitting cells, its ragged joints, synapses 

firing like a lighter out of fuel; can picture the light 

passing through my mother as her father rose 

     to wherever the tired body releases its glowing & weightless 

vibration, a wave of affirmation washing through her, molecular, 

on its way to something else.

 

These are empty spaces we fill with whatever makes us safe.

Let us enter them blindly, 

our eyes open in their wake.