Rebecca Brock
Rebecca Brock’s work appears in The Threepenny Review, Literary Mama, River Heron Review, Whale Road Review and elsewhere. She won The Comstock Review’s 2022 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Poetry Contest, judged by Ellen Bass, and the 2022 Kelsay Women’s Poetry Contest. Her first chapbook is Each Bearing Out (Kelsay Books 2022). She reads for SWWIM. Idaho born, she lives in Virginia, with her family. You can find more of her work at www.rebeccabrock.org
Geologic Unconformity
This mountain, this erosion
of a mountain—against my palm
the warm stone arcs
like a dollar store puzzle
that fits, but barely holds—
I ask my son, What was it?
It meant absence, it meant gap—
He sighs from the depths
of his new voice, recalls the park ranger
from yesterday: Geologic Unconformity, Mom.
And I remember how it felt
like something I already knew—
that record of no record:
an accounting of absence
equal to years. Millions,
more by millions than we
have even been wandering here.
This is the year I watch
my son’s shoulders gain even height
with mine. Silver strands of hair,
among my brown recall
my grandfather, his auburn hair
and how it turned white
over the course of one night.
How this is told as some measure
of his immeasurable loss, his gap
between times: one night,
a young enough man
went to sleep, and when he woke
he was old.
I don’t know what happens
to a person between one thing
and the next, how it holds
through bones—beneath skin,
a striated measure
of when and how the heart
gives out or how it holds—
changes cadence, changes
shape—here: a grandfather and the boy
he never met who carries his name,
and a woman, suddenly me,
letting go strands to glint
and tangle stone, or wind—
all of it telling
how not one of us
can stay.
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