Updated: Nov 30, 2023
by Eric Pankey
Stripped of ritual, your gathering takes on the mood of a dinner party at which you are neither guest nor host. Stewed turnips weep into the mash potatoes. The cod is undercooked. You are about to speak your mind, but the words shimmy and dangle before your eyes like three or four wasps inside a revival tent. The woman next to you complains of a feather lodged in her heart. Her husband argues that memory, like an echo, diminishes over distance. You notice the pencil lines on the wall, which once marked their child’s changing height, have been painted over. Outside: blue nocturnal shadows, red twiggy remains of shrubs above snow. With each click of the View-Master, the scene changes: the dining room displaced by a thicket of whispers. By hearsay. By heresy.
When a wildfire at last
Collapses, spent,
One considers the quiet
Modesty of stones,
How the present
Is at once ephemeral
And persistent.
After a poem,
What is left?
Words defined
In reference
To other words.
Eric Pankey is the author of many collections of poetry. Two new books are forthcoming, The History of the Siege and Vanishments, in 2024.