Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It

Grace Note

Kevin Powers

It's time to take a break from all that now.
No use the artifacts
from which I've built the buried outline of a life,
no use the broken breath
which I recall from time to time
still rattles in my chest. Yes, we're due:
a break from everything, from use,
from breath, from artifacts, from life,
from death, from every unmoored memory
I've wasted all those hours upon
hoping someday something will make sense:
the old man underneath the corrugated plastic
awning of the porch, drunk and slightly
slipping off into the granite hills
of southeast Connecticut already, the hills sheaved off
and him sheaved off and saying
(in reply to what?) "Boy, that weren't nothing
but true facts about the world."
That was it. The thing I can't recall
was what I had been waiting for.
It likely won't come back again.
And I know better than to hope,
but one might wait
and pay attention
and rest awhile,
for we are more than figuring the odds.