Four Poems

Forgive Me; I Was Late to Work Because the Morning Made Me Tremble

This morning the moon is out as the sun
begins to rise. Sometimes I think of them
as friends, one watching the other sleep,
the other waking up, stretching wide. The sun
smiles. I didn’t see you there, it says, & then:
You better watch me now. What a show such
friendship makes of sky — a morning blushed
flush with orange, & a night so bright it turns
the tops of waves to stars. Do you think we know,
really, how to live? Most days, I put my eye mask on
to sleep & shut out everything the world is teaching me.

While Walking to the Train, I Remember Walking to the Train Years Before, the Day I Relearned How to Move After the Month I Spent Relearning How to Bend My Knee, My Body Moving Slower Than It Ever Had, & the People, & the People, & the People, How They Passed Me & How I Had No Words

I’m so tired
I overheard someone say
Of being asked about pain

I’m so tired
Someone said back
Of asking about it

& I’m so tired
I sometimes think
Of feeling

In the City, Mourning the Whole City, We Cannot Sleep for Shit

At night, we lay awake staring at the lights in the sky.
Are we ready, we say, Do we want to? & if we wanted to,
we say, Could we? A friend once told me that even joy
makes her worried, so worried she is of loss. Happiness,
I know now, is just a choice you make to be a little bit insane,
turning each day’s litany of the ordinary into a list
of everything that hasn’t quite been finished yet,
the way I used to think the brilliant shimmering trace
of a star’s dying light was the result of a kiss blown
by my mother, who was far away. I am scared of life
& scared, too, of death. But I am scared the most of losing
that first & fleeting bit of light I have before I lose the rest.

Waking up in Beverly Hospital

In that morning before light they wheeled me
past the child sleeping in the ER, the drunk man
leaning over the bucket placed beside the bed.
There were balloons floating in the dark. A chorus
of resonant beeps, submarines searching a dim
& lonely ocean. The nurse said she had just met
someone named Devin, & I wondered but didn’t ask
if she had seen me before, if it’s possible to exist outside
your body in another body, or to live twice the same life,
repeating each day without knowing, until one day
you know, finally, that you have seen it all before.
I was alone when the light mellowed the linoleum,
alone until they rolled the old man beside me, the one
who thought his heart was failing, though it was really
his lungs. He kept coughing & worrying about a test
he thought he’d have to have. It sounded awful, this test—
a tube the length of his body. It never came. I think
I misunderstand, every day, the purpose of pain.
The man told his doctor a story about a friend
he couldn’t talk out of death, the one who pressed
a gun with his own hands against his own head. He said
he found something honorable about that kind of escape.
I’d rather be him, he said, than me, & the doctor
told him his worry was so far ahead of his body.
At the time, I didn’t know what was wrong with me.
I shat myself & felt a kind of intimacy with the man
who watched my heartbeat through a screen, the nurse
who changed my sheets without making me feel ashamed.
I think we spend our whole lives wondering when we heal,
not knowing that we are healing for our whole lives. I left
the hospital in the same sweater I arrived, with the same
heart beating between the same ribs that hold me up. What
am I supposed to do with the story I call myself? It astounds
me every day. Now, when I am in the midst of something
ordinary — removing my shirt for a shower — I hear
my heart & wonder. Maybe I will be sick again. Inevitably,
that will be how it happens. In the midst of something
ordinary. I will be walking in the city & feel struck—
by the light, maybe, or maybe by something awful—
& in that moment before I fall, if I fall at all, I will say,
hand to heart, I swear, I still can’t believe I’m here.

——
Devin Kelly is a high school teacher in New York City. His novel Pilgrims is forthcoming from Great Place Books.