Ruth Bardon
Image by Nathan Watson from Unsplash
Ruth Bardon's poems have appeared in Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Salamander, Moon City Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Demon Barber, was published in 2020 by Main Street Rag, and her second, What You Wish For, will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2023. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and she lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Eclipse
Right after the eclipse, we all were crazy
to see another one, planning Boston
in seven years, Iceland in nine, hanging on
to that moment when the sun had disappeared,
leaving us stranded in the universe,
with no control over our bodies,
which were pulled by the sight like puppets,
made to yell and point and cry,
but then we forgot it, went ahead
in our small predictable circles,
though for years I had remembered
an opioid, no longer in use,
that I’d tasted for ten minutes
when my first child was born,
had craved it and felt disappointed
when my second came too fast
for any drug at all,
had remembered that dreamy joy
after I’d erased everything else
about how labor felt, how I thought
oh yes, this as it started up again
and how it disappeared,
eclipsed by the baby himself.
So little remains in my memory
of all those sleepless nights,
the heavy days that followed,
just pale scraps and slivers,
and when I sometimes try to hear again
the voices of the people that I’ve lost,
the longer that they’re gone, the more I fail,
hearing instead their words in my own voice,
although I still retain the way I felt
hearing their voices then, like a vibration
continuing after the bell is stifled—
the obscure mathematics
of adding and subtracting pain and pleasure
leave me wondering what I’ll recall
from any time of grief or time of joy,
looking now at the pictures we all took
of shimmering crescents underneath the trees,
the leaves transformed into a row of pinholes
that threw the alien sun down at our feet,
the most unearthly thing we’d ever seen
until we raised our faces to the sky.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
©2022 West Trade Review
Stay Connected to Our Literary Community. Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Listen:
