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Editor's
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Three
Poems
By
Jason
Visconti
The
Epitaph I Scrawled in
Kindergarten
Not
knowing men made stuff
even
for graves
and
in the midst of a drawing I doted on
with
a roundabout pen
I
unwittingly serviced my soul with no gray hairs at all:
it
was, as you'd expect,
a
phrase I'd snagged from a picture book,
or
the chiming exclamations in my favorite cartoon,
or
the perilous journey of crayon crossing the lines,
interrupted
when I'd line up for lunch and be well.
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The Wake
I
try to tell myself this is sleep.
It
is Sunday morning, the cat is napping
at
his feet, the room is dark
except
for a hing of daylight coming through
the
window, I sit cross-legged
the
good son, waiting on the move
of
a limb, the curl of a toe,
his
face changing from the obvious
stasis
of a dream
to
one that always seems working,
I
roll his shoulders to say this
now is waking,
which
of course itself is a comfortable dream
that's
actually happening, it is Sunday morning
I
stand and wonder why he's already dressed
why
he's lying on his back like someone propped him up
then
dropped him down, lost him to a weight
beyond
this world, a posture trapped
in
the middle of the act,
why
the pause doesn't show on his face,
and
if it's Sunday, if it's still slow morning
drill,
if it's about waking to his son
in
the inevitable guile of time's watch,
here,
here is my hand,
wake
up to the world.
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