MYSTERY LIGHT

 

Sometimes, when I'm in an old building --
marble floors and dark wood smelling of history --
I can't help but press one of the light switches
on the wall, those ancient metal buttons
blackened by the touch of countless fingers,
curious to see if they are still functional.
I did the same as a kid, in church basements
and schools, houses with unfinished attics,
half-expecting someone to storm through the door,
demanding to know who flipped the switch,
the one that controlled the whole neighborhood.
We certainly lived in enough places with wiring
from the turn of the century, lights flickering,
unsure if they wanted to work or not;
some you'd have to flip three times, rapidly,
to wake, or press with just the right force.
Not surprisingly, more than one of those houses
burned to the ground after we had left.
These days -- so many years turned to shadow
in my periphery -- I can't help but wonder,
against my own reason, if I'm turning on the light
in some distant room of the past, my brother
blowing ribbons of cigarette smoke, balanced on
the narrow window ledge, my older sister
curling her hair for a date, telling another corny joke.
There are rooms I would not want to enter --
some known, some forever closed -- but I'd take
my chances to see those faces lit up again.

SUBTITLES

 

I don't know when it happened, but I have grown

too old or too lazy to read the subtitles of foreign movies,

snippets of dialogue scrolling across the bottom of

the television screen like a stock market ticker,

another language I can never hope to understand.

We used to watch them nearly every weekend,

caught the classics and the obscure at film festivals,

along with the old Hollywood variety, all those beautiful

made-up faces speaking as though they came from

nowhere in particular, a place we longed to be.

You always said that people should come with subtitles,

and -- most of us, at least -- with warning labels.

I sometimes wish for a translation of all the things

you did not say, every ellipses when you looked away,

though you are now beyond the world of words.

I do miss sharing a language, speaking in shorthand.

Last week, I let an old black-and-white movie run,

the sound turned down to a muffled whisper,

while I dozed off. I could comprehend the passion

well enough, occasional bursts of anger, the wariness

that men and women always bring to each other.

I could understand it this way, the sudden slamming

of a door, sad eyes gazing from a cloudy cafe window,

the rushing toward a train, its smoke a signature.

I could imagine then how it all worked out.

PHONE BOOTH

 

Once, you could find one almost anywhere,

a small and unassuming refuge, and sometimes

the only shelter from a sudden downpour,

the floor of an uncertain summer sky collapsing,

casting hard fistfuls of rain and hail against

the narrow panes of glass, tumbling down from

its small square roof, dimly-lit from within.

Sometimes it seemed the only refuge

from the constant clang and drone of the city,

the exact intersection of public and private,

a hand-me-down space that granted legitimate reason

for squeezing in close beside your first girlfriend,

stranded, shivering, calling home for a ride.

I can still feel the weight of those phone books,

suspended by cables, knocking at our knees,

the thick heavy receiver, the unexpected blessing

of a coin someone had left, mistakenly or not.

I remember most my sister, exiled by our mother

to the booth outside the grocery store,

evenings whiled away under its moth-yellow glow,

chatting and laughing with her latest beau,

making call after call with the same lucky quarter.

There were always messages -- a religious tract

to make a child ponder the afterlife, always an expletive

or phone number, or the secret code of initials,

a bright red heart rounded with a Sharpie.

But you knew that someone loved someone else,

enough so to write it down for all to see,

or scratched it into metal, sticky and smudged,

those rough, uneven letters, as close to permanent

as anything -- their messages still there,

long after their houses have all been removed,

declaring themselves, always in the present tense,

far above our cool and collective silence.