Empty
This is the empty morning
of
empty mornings.
“Morning” JK Durick
There
is no easy. We put things right that can
be
righted. Remember emptying
ashtrays?
But
the evening is already fading – who went
where
with whom, how much was drunk, what
the
drunk said and swore to. Can we salvage
anything? Check the trash for the good forks,
fumble
under sofa cushions, try to recall why
that
woman, wife of someone, slipped and fell,
why
she wasn’t wearing underwear, try to recall
any
conversation worth recalling, empty all
the glasses left on every flat, crowded surface.
Day
So much of it is filler, spent waking
up,
dressing, undressing, nodding off
into a sketchy slumber. We eat, drink,
defecate, scratch. We contemplate
ourselves and others to and fro, here
and there. We entertain ourselves
in such simple ways – no goals
really – passing, filling,
killing what time we’re allotted.
Every so often, we achieve, produce,
fulfill commitments real and imagined,
almost in error, a mistaken, fleeting
usefulness overcomes the
earning/spending,
and are counted virtues in our ersatz
busy-ness. The day is a goat,
consuming whatever garbage time produces.
Nonetheless
For all the vaunted individuality,
that heady
uniqueness, the snowflakes we assemble
of ourselves, the tastes exactly the
taste
of others, but we are us and there is,
has
never been, anyone quite like us, it
all
becomes less believable the older and
wiser
we get, as the muck we will become,
becomes
more and more apparent and obscure.
That is what we make peace with as we
can
– not that we will end on the opposite
side
of special, but that we will be that
feeble memory,
that head scratch: “Oh yes. I seem to remember
him” or worse, the memorial
rear-window sticker,
the roadside shrine, the largely
unvisited stone
with which we disturb a green lawn,
the neglected
funeral card holding a page in a book.
Between, there may be a scrap of
dignity,
a few honest moments when we know well
we were nothing that rare,
but lived as if we were, nonetheless.
Haunts
Then haunts are merely places we go to
remember
some person, some moment caught in
time,
an emotion in aspic or a reflection in
a window of rain.
Then there are haunts that surprise,
that appear
with an odor or a color or texture,
taste, that note,
that song – where did I hear it
last? With whom?
Those that ambush – vengeful, dripping
regret – a scratching
on a night window, a morning like the
one after, failures and feigned
indifferences recycled in dreams, in
each hidden pocket of the day.
We needn’t seek them then – these
stuck moments, these second-hand
memories, these dollar store
sentiments – better not to, lest we,
like some poor souls, become the past before we are the past.
Between
for Dono
jobs,
women, weekends, drinks
–
that’s where most of life is.
It
all works its way down to
doctors’
appointments, meals,
medications,
waiting rooms.
Between
where you are and
where
I am, life is there in all
of
its bits and shiny pieces.
Douglas K Currier holds an MFA in poetry, University of Pittsburgh. His work has appeared in several magazines and anthologies in the United States and Argentina. He is the author of five poetry collections in Spanish: Desnuda parada sobre un techo (1989), Vida prestada: poemas con sabor a Tango (2021), Regreso (2022), Exogénesis (2024), and Nuestra Senora del Sueño (2026) bilingual with Marcos Kura. Señorita Death (2022), Death Studies (2023), and Conversations with Death (2025) are in English. Peach (2025) is the author’s first collection of short stories. Currier lives with his wife in Winooski, Vermont, and Corrientes, Argentina.
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