Cusp
Life Stories
Point of Interest
15 Minute City
Stage Dad
Belongings
My Practice
Design Thinking
Bourgeois
Absorptive Capacity
Productivity Hack
Friendship
The pizzeria where we ate along the Seine
had nothing but card tables and folding chairs.
I had turned forty that day, the occasion
arriving as reliably as the Eiffel Tower’s
light show, whose sparkling signaled
everything other than an emergency.
All the foreshadows were dispelled.
Maybe the past is inevitability revised
as a series of warnings we should have
distinguished, but what I remember
most are the absences.
No aching in my left knee.
The contacts clung easily to my eyes
without causing any discomfort.
My daily pill had yet to be prescribed.
In the distance, Notre Dame
was prepared to stand there forever.
The clouds can’t complain in a diary
about how they were micromanaged by the wind
that blew them to this particular point in the sky.
If the ants want to whine about all the dirt
they needed to dig through to bring the food
back and forth, they won’t do it on paper.
More aware of its gradual, continual dying
than any of us, the sun literally has all day,
but its memories have been left unrecorded.
What might a flower have written about
its first experience of photosynthesis,
or the realization its petals aren’t permanent?
Do the fruits think of the seeds they carry
the way we do about the thoughts and ideas
we keep within us, until the time finally comes
that they no longer need to be protected,
but can be spread by whoever discovers them,
cultivated into something more than we were?
It makes you wonder if the river’s rippling
isn’t just a crumpling of its chronicles, the result
of worrying about others reading its secrets.
Only the moon maintains the habit of a journal,
self-reflecting in halves and crescent shapes,
each entry begging us to invade its privacy.
Like Barcelona this past summer,
my worries have become a site of overtourism.
There are no hordes of drunken relievers
singing and dancing within my worries;
That might have livened the place up a little.
My worries are also in no danger of sinking
like Venice in the Adriatic Sea. My worries
seem to remain almost stubbornly buoyant.
It’s not crowds wearing out my worries.
It’s just me, here again for the umpteenth time,
visiting the same old spots and hoping
my worries don’t squirt me with a watergun
or start levying some kind of tax or a fee.
You can’t even bring a camera here
other than your memory, but I’m still trying
to get that perfect shot of myself, where I’m
standing in front of my worries making
a peace sign. I realize all these trips
mean my worries might start falling apart,
but I figure that’s okay – that ruins
always look a little more beautiful
once they are long past the point
of ever being functional again.
Access to anything you could want or need
within a quarter of an hour or less: that’s the goal.
Like a gym, a grocery store, a tarot card reader
or a fire escape just outside an apartment window
you can sit on once the party’s become too much.
Within that same period, through, I think of
the waiters in the alley behind the restaurant
using the trash cans as a stoop while they smoke.
I recall the first responders taking a second
as they lean against the hospital’s brick facade,
laughing about everything that’s not urgent.
Earlier still I’d glanced up at the window washers
who halted work on their suspended scaffolding
to unwrap the cellophane on their sandwiches.
These increments are breaks believed long enough
to rejuvenate and revitalize. But they also encompass
the moment HR hands over the termination papers,
what crooks need to rob a convenience store,
or a doctor’s diagnosis that changes your entire life.
Let’s focus on other ways they could be spent:
watching coming attractions at the movie theater.
Standing in line at a club where the music’s worth it.
Foreplay where hands do anything but track time.
My daughter is auditioning
alone in her bedroom
by recording herself singing
a Broadway song I don’t recognize.
(It is now common practice
to set up a YouTube channel
where you belt out standards
to attract an agent’s eye.)
At the bottom of the stairs
I put my book down in my lap
and try to imagine the expression
she’s giving to the camera,
try to savor in her voice
the breathless excitement
she now keeps hidden from me.
Oh, I can hear her longing
for a lead role in somebody’s story.
She is unaware, or has forgotten,
that I already gave her a part
in a show with an indefinite run.
Regardless of what the signs say,
I would like someone besides me
to take a little responsibility
for all the lost and stolen items.
I’m not talking about the glances
that boy is stealing at the girl
in the coffee shop. That’s on him.
But my sense of compassion
has been missing for days now,
and I’ve looked all over the house.
It’s probably related to all the lives
that keep getting taken from me.
No chance they were mislaid.
Yes, occasionally I might have
left them unattended, but never
on a table at the public library
or some bench at an airport.
Their deaths pilfered my ability
to suffer anyone else’s suffering.
The real thief to blame for this
would have to be time, I’d write
on the police report I won’t file.
Rifling through dresser drawers
and pulling up couch cushions,
I look for clues in the stray coins
and mystery keys. Tell me, why
have I managed to safeguard
everything but the valuables?
Turn off your mind, the mural outside
the yoga studio says. The naked arch
of a man's brown-skinned spine ends
with an explosion of flowers where
his head should be. But even if I had
the time to bend and stretch, I feel
a responsibility to keep my conscious
brain active. To never be so downward-
facing that I turn away from wars
that reduce homes and churches
to rubble, or not notice the books
missing from libraries and schools.
Instead I look up like a cobra at the
hateful faces of people who ignore
science, a hate more visible than
any mask. I don't want to pose
as a warrior, but to fight like one.
Not to root one foot in the imitation
of a tree, but to save some of them.
No offense to anyone who's inside
concentrating on nothing more
than their breath and the plank,
but I'm going to continue standing
out here in the cold, deliberating
until some sort of answers arrive.
This is a position I'm able to hold
for longer than you might think.
Making is never neutral:
the cookies have extra
chocolate chips because
she really, really loves me,
the software is easy to use
so that the work never stops.
That skate park was set up
by a community that wanted
to know where their kids are,
and the extra lanes added
to the road were no accident.
The photograph is focused
on what you’re meant to see.
Take a guess why the news
program led with what’s bad.
Every song? A seduction.
The clouds may appear
careless, and the sand
objective, the waves open
to anything. Feel the sun,
however, and you’ll know
that God had no intention
of being impartial. Even the air
is taking some kind of side,
assessing with each inhale
whether I might be swayed.
I was too happy to be successful.
Got the girl, which meant my heart
remained intact, no songs necessary
to invoke all the love I never lost.
The money I made was enough
to buy the house, the car, the TV
and eat out in restaurants so often
my art was bereft of holes to fill.
My kids made up for all the fans
movie roles might’ve earned me,
and even a few friends sufficed
as stand-ins for critical acclaim.
My canvases remained as blank
as the vanilla ice cream I spooned
into a bowl before curling up
on the couch, a nearby afghan
waiting for me to wrap myself
in the soft warmth of my failure.
Once a new dish towel has been hung
from the long handle on the oven door
I never want to burden it by passing
on the stains my hands get from cleaning.
I don’t even want to wrinkle the fabric.
Even if that’s how it’s meant to be used,
and in theory the washing machine
could remove any trace of the residue,
I prefer the terry cloth’s potential to dry,
rather than see what the wet will do.
Fondling the fibers a bit sadly, I accept
even decorative items will need laundering.
All day long, far away from my kitchen,
I’ll encounter people who could tell you
the exact moment a towel becomes a rag.
There's no one around to see me
but I still feel guilty, sitting on a park bench.
Somewhere there are people
taking back-to-back meetings,
either in person or through a screen.
Waitstaff are scribbling down orders
and carrying plates over to tables.
A scientist is peering into a microscope
and pursing her lips as she turns
the knobs to focus on a petri dish
that could hold the clue to a cure.
Nearby, the birds are outdoing me too,
flitting from one tree to another
in some kind of survey or audit.
Motionless, I’m falling so far behind
what I've forgotten to get ahead of.
The wood plank supporting my back
and my seat are like the hard covers
of a book, and my body in between
is the complete story of my inertia.
And I, riveted, its ideal reader.
What? You too? I thought
I was the only one who
starts songs over from the beginning
if my mind wanders before the chorus,
and saves my favorite food on the plate
so it becomes the last thing I eat.
Alphabetizing your books is like
exchanging a secret handshake with me.
It’s so true – Postcards from the Edge
is one example of where the movie was better!
We’re bound to have our differences,
but for now, everything we share
feels like God was practicing what
psychologists call “looping for understanding,”
a way of conveying just how closely
he’s been listening. This little shimmer
of recognition we’re reflecting in our eyes,
that’s his way of saying to each of us,
“So, what I’m hearing is you’re looking
for someone like this. Did I get that right?”
Shane Schick has had poems published in the U.S., Canada, India and Africa. He lives with his wife and three children in Whitby, Ont. More: ShaneSchick.com. Twitter/X:@ShaneSchick
