The whipped soul, the whacked and wounded self,

the bleeding bowels, the suffocating shadow,

the post-war flashing star in the broken bottle

of the nation, I had acute something the matter

with me. I was the absence I made of myself as I sat

in a soft chair. I was the lost piece of the moon rocket

that never fell to earth. I was faster than the eagle

on the back of the quarter I tossed into the bay.

I was the letter on the oval desk of the President.

I could not receive. I could not be received.

Just when it seemed my mother couldn’t bear

one more needle, one more insane orange pill,

my sister, in silence, stood at the end

of the bed and slowly rubbed her feet,

which were scratchy with hard, yellow skin,

and dirt cramped beneath the broken nails,

which changed nothing in time except

the way my mother was lost in it for a while

as if with a kind of relief hat doesn’t relieve.

And then, with her eyes closed, my mother said

the one or two words the living have for gratefulness;

which is a kind of forgetting, with a sense

of what it means to be alive long enough

to love someone: Thank you, she said. As for me,

I didn’t care how her voice suddenly seemed low

and kind, or what failures and triumphs

of the body and spirit brought her to that point—

just that it sounded like hope, stupid hope.

From Stupid Hope. © 2009 by Jason Shinder. All rights reserved.