At This Moment No One’s Thinking
about me. Jeff sorts papers on his desk, scanning some, shredding others.
Liz shakes hay into the hay net. A gelding nickers and stretches his lips. Come and get it, Trooper! She rubs the muscle in his neck.
Ann lights the oven. She’s peeled the last apple, skin in cursive spirals. She churns fruit, cinnamon and sugar, with a pinch of nutmeg.
Tom elevates sore legs and opens the magazine dropped through his mail slot. He stops to read the contributor’s note tagged to a poem he likes.
I’m thinking about them: husband, daughter, friends.
I think of my nephew’s wife, pregnant after a miscarriage. My sister presses their doorbell with an elbow, pan of lasagna balanced on her hip.
If no one’s thinking about me, good, I’m in no one’s crosshairs.
Or if I’m to receive a plaque or scroll or large honorarium, perhaps no one has thought of me yet.
At 92 my grandma would say, “God has forgotten me!” All her friends were dead, plus her husband, brother, only cousin.
To be forgotten by God is to be in hell.
But when God thinks about a human being, it’s not exactly sweet.
God, don’t forget me but don’t think of me yet.
Those who loved me whom God has thought of — grandma, mother, father — I remember watering tomatoes, pedaling the piano crescendos in “Theme from The Apartment.”
“Do what you want — it won’t last,” Grandma shrugs.
And my father, banished after dinner to smoke outside, drops a match on the rain-damp lawn.