The Bookends Review

Forest roots
bulge through
the dirt road’s
four-wheel drive
tracks.

The homeless man
lies on the sidewalk
giving pedestrians
a few more steps
registered on pedometers.

– Diane Webster…

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My lover tells me the story of Laüstic, The Nightingale. In Marie de France’s lai, a noble woman listens to a nightingale on her balcony each evening in the unspoken company of a handsome neighbor for whom she yearns as beautifully and perfectly as the bird sings. Her husband, ignorant of his rival, kills the nightingale and delivers her the bird wrapped in his handkerchief. Now you will have no reason to leave our chamber and stand on the balcony. The corpse is small and warm, the linen damp and stained with blood from the arrow’s wound. She holds it until even her burning hands cannot warm the bones.

My lover is the jealous husband. His wife, who is still in the city where he used live, meets nightly with his best friend.…

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For where there is one of me, always there will be another. Either at the next stanchion or post, or following soon after, while I lay dropped and drooling over my existence, in the dark grip of a dizzying blue gas, or cold-cocked by the weak-jawed clear-browed hero of sensitivity.

For while not always strong, we are the silent type. Born we are for epaulets and chin straps and monochrome jumpers, for frayed tunics and rusty chain mail, for bulky suits bulging with implication and lead-pumping danger, for the ability to rush headlong into an order, carrying it out with feckless determination, knowing well the disposability of our movements, our trigger fingers (ever itchy), the very things we see.

For what we see is always first, and never fully known.…

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“It has always seemed to me that the two most influential things which can occur in the life of a boy just on the cusp of puberty are to have his father die or to have his father live. In either event, it forces the young man to choose the path of his identity or lack thereof in the inevitable downriver progress of his life.” If this quotation sounds to you like the words of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, I’ll accept that compliment and move happily along, for to sound like Twain is a consummation devoutly to be wished by any American writer.

We writers are all about voice and giving voices to our narrators and characters. But, in whose voice do they speak? Is it ours or their own?…

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Gabe was standing beneath a light, misty drizzle, checking on his little bit of garden—the flowerpots on the second-floor balcony. Playing through his head was a snippet of Sibelius he’d been listening to, over and over, the day before while he was trying to get his grading done. But he didn’t know the whole piece by heart—far from it— so mostly the same bit was repeating, over and over.

The melody was in the horn section. There was something so lonely about a French horn. Composers almost always grouped their horns by four or eight. And yet they still sounded lonely. Like a group of lonely people who had gathered together… to be lonely together.

He kneeled down to see that one of the cups he had set out to catch rainwater had a cricket in it.…

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I sit in my room and watch the paint dry,
although it’s not wet. I wish it was
as that would be something to do
other than just sitting.

In the summer they wheel me outside
and I sit
smothered in sun tan lotion
in my straw hat and watch the grass grow.

My life has become slow,
each day sliding silently into the next
while I wait
for my last breath,
for the sun to go down
on this quiet solitude
where I am surrounded by kindness
and dying of boredom.

I used to be so busy
but now I must be content
with the grass and the paint.
As if old people did not need something to do
in their last years,
someone to talk to as their world shrinks
down to a room,
to a bed
and finally to a box
where there is nothing to do
but sleep.…

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The woman did not cry when her husband told her he was leaving.

No. She was a woman with a hard mother––a good mother––one who taught her to never become a wretch. A hard mother who taught her that men had hearts, but they were different from women’s; they were colder, and better for shaping, like biscuit dough. She showed the woman, then a girl, how to hold the dough, how to warm it enough to bend but not enough to stick, and then she showed the girl the wretches, the abandoned women, the ghoulish, vacant wanderers. She showed her them as a warning to never join them.

Her husband told her at the table, stone-faced and flinty-eyed. The one she’d bought after they first married, stumbling around a furniture store drunk on love and hope.…

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