At the Dealership
The morning paper they’ve given to distract us
grieves for eight bikers killed on the road,
and an airport bombed in the Middle East.
It welcomes new refugees from Angola
to our small city which has opened
the sports arena to offer housing.
A friend texts that she had a sleepless night
and feels weepy. My love, for whom reading’s
grown difficult, opens a National Geographic
to wild animals used to draw tourists,
then hobbled and caged, pangolins almost
killed to extinction for their scales.
My daughter puts a photo on Facebook
of herself at three, in jeans and cowboy boots,
so young I almost weep at that bright face.
Salesmen bring good news for some,
big repairs for others. The rest of us
check the time, settle in. My husband
turns the page, and there’s the Sargasso Sea,
itself turning like a slow gyre,
surrounded by four currents and no land.
Around us a businessman phones in
to change appointments, an elderly man
cups his ear to catch his wife’s words,
a young woman scrolls through her phone.
On the paper’s front page, people stare at a sea
of cots, having traveled far and still not done.
A pod of whales is held in small filthy tanks
in Russia, whose language my husband
once spoke, he for whom our daughter
waited each evening on the porch, dancing
as he pulled in the drive, he who could change oil,
rotate tires, whatever the car needed.
How strange to think of a sea without land,
the doldrums of little sleep and long waits,
the way we grow porous in stalled transit,
endless currents of longing and grief.
When it’s finally our time to pay
I ask the manager to roll up his sleeve
and show us again his tattoo —
five stick figures with smiling heads
and small waving hands, a drawing
his children made for him and he’s had
inked on his arm so he can carry them
as long as his arm exists.