Salt by M - Rattle: Poetry (original) (raw)

In this room down a hall

at the Hopewell House

every Wednesday

from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.,

the widowed have agreed to meet

to lick the salt block.

My name tag reads

Albino deer (recessive rarity): widow at 35.

Dun-colored Helen and Marie

mistake me for a sheep or a goat

as we draw our chairs into a circle

of circumstance. Muscles in their aged faces

twitch with greed and suspicion.

In the larger world,

Jean and I would sit in adjoining streetcar seats,

read our newspapers,

and never share a headline.

Even Doris, who drags the remains

of a personal god at the bottom

of her purse, tucked next to non-prescription

reading glasses she bought on sale at Walmart,

shrinks from my pink eyes.

Louise has ten grandchildren,

three she and Harry were raising

because her daughter is, well, you know,

she doesn’t want to say. She won’t tell you either

that when Harry up and died like that,

some small part of her wished

he’d had the decency to take those kids with him,

but he never even took them to the park.

Betty lost a husband and found

a lump. Elsie says when the ambulance

comes to the Ridgewood Nursing Home,

they don’t turn on the sirens

for fear they’ll incite a riot

of dying. Ida says yeah, she knows.

She’s lost two of them that way. I nod.

Judith’s raised eyebrow asks

What could one with hooves so pale know of loss?

A marriage must be long

to be 40 years deep,

and grief is a black market business

best kept to themselves. If I taste it,

others will want it.

Young bucks will be dying in droves.

In war, in the streets,

in flaming buildings.

Or quietly in a bed next to me at night.

That sting in the wound, that particular tang

on the tongue, are theirs.

Keep me away from the salt.

Their old ones are sanctified,

their sorrow is sacred,

denial alive in the hide.