Someone Has to Polish the Statues at the Top of Skyscrapers
In the Opposite of Neverland
Silver Balloon Caught in my Rhododendrons
GET OFF OF MY LAWN
Postcard to my Future Self
In the Woodlands
Someone Has to Polish the Statues at the Top of Skyscrapers
Which means someone has,
ladder in hand, leather harness
strapped to their gut, keychain
jangle of S-clips and buckles
clamoring at their hips,
climbed the brow of morning fog
when the night before
their wife served them
divorce papers, has winched and
shimmied and bloody-knuckled up,
has smeared polishing goop
on long-dead green-cloyed faces,
has, fingernails moon-crescented
by the soil of their brother's grave,
brought a rag to copper cheeks,
bronze helmets, brass flanks
of a rearing stallion, has interred
the murk, the gunk, the pigeon-
shit scabs of yesterday into
a mausoleum of bright, has done this
on those clearest days
when gravity's argument
is the most profound,
impossible to say "no" to,
has said "no" anyway,
has hovered over earth
with a God’s eye view of every car
wreck, every held up gas station,
every ambulance-gutted block
and chosen the work still
to do, the shine.
Where we must think happy thoughts to stay on the ground
our baby levitates over us like a tiny parade float,
bumping into walls, our trailing succulents,
fan blades dust-fuzzed and never turned on.
We refuse to become moons,
to gravity ourselves into an orbit around her.
"It’s better this way," we say.
(The ground inches closer, then backs away.)
Out the window dogs walk themselves
below vertical leashes,
boys drop basketballs into rims,
the mailwoman rappels down house edifices.
Today’s deliveries: a net for the crib,
a mop for the footprints on the ceiling.
Our baby screams; we rise up to reach her.
Then, slow as plastic grocery bags, we fall.
Our love brings us down.
Silver Balloon Caught in my Rhododendrons
After the body’s been removed
and the family’s been removed,
the sheets stripped off the bed
and the tendrils unplugged from the loquacious machines,
after all this, someone has to gather
the exhausted carnations, the defeated get well cards,
the bright and ignorant balloons
and decide what to do with them.
Let the flowers go to the comatose husband
down the hall, the one who moves
like a dog dreaming (get well
the flowers say; come closer before it’s too--).
Let the cards be tied to the balloons’ strings,
and the balloons released in the rehab garden
over a one-eyed girl squeezing a tomato
until it unspools through the gaps
between her fingers. Up, up, up
the balloons, the cards go,
until they reach the dead,
who reply by sending the cards back,
the ink blurred, the paper chewed,
the words and names illegible, but oh
the message, let it reach the one who needs it,
and let it, too, be clear.
the sun said. And Icarus did.
And we watched him
flutter like an electric bill
flung from Olympus,
and when we looked up
again the sun taunted us--
Look me in the eye, it said,
its chemtrail dreadlocks
menacing as kraken arms--
but we were too busy
seeing what we didn't know
had been ours all along:
the dream, that unmanned blue
where the flight had been,
could be.
The record done, the needle unspools
a lonely breathing. Outside,
passing cars rush like bread-
thieves carrying loaves of light.
I must confess: I am sad, thinking
about your sadness. I am grateful for it too.
The thoughts you ferry to me press against my skin,
warm as a Black Dog’s breath.
I play for them a tune
on the wide wooden piano of our floorboards.
(You know how it goes.)
Lift the needle and you'll get a silence
like a silence you've heard before.
But you haven't!
Each quiet is a new quiet
opening up its arms.
I took turns dancing
in the yard with two sisters
Louis Armstrong on the record player
Gerald dragged to the porch
4am drunk our bare feet gathering
dew like small rooted things
until we floated out of our skins
the way notes rise from sheet music
and threaded ourselves like cards
into dawn’s bicycle spokes
when I arrived
finally back in my body
in an office in a rolling chair
before a hulking desk
20 years had turned into names
traced on the back of a river
"how did I get here" I asked
the wrong question
Todd Dillard's work has appeared in numerous publications, including Best New Poets, McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies, Electric Literature, Nimrod, Superstition Review, and Split Lip Magazine. His work was selected as a finalist for the 2018 “Best Small Fictions” anthology, and has been nominated numerous times for the “Best of the Net” and the Pushcart anthologies. He is a recipient of the Birdwhistle Poetry Prize. His debut collection, Ways We Vanish, came out in 2020 from Okay Donkey Press.
