Lucía M. Polis The Poetry of

I was three years old when you were born.
There is no honour, beauty, or poetry in death,
only fact.

When they come to the house, these men
in uniforms so navy
that might as well be black,

a yellow stripe runs the length of the leg
(a confession of these men’s
dirty profession?)


hope flies, hobbled, out the window.
In the emergency room, so obscenely named,
(The deed is done. What urgency?)

the calendar, politely folded, states to me:
October 7. And later, you might want to try
to forget the date,

but never this day, this night
when they bring you in
to embrace a corpse.


His blue lips gently bloom, as in a sneer.
You can hear yourself wonder whether
he’d hear their hushed conversations.

You marvel at the most delicate tracery
of the imprint of a rope upon that
well-muscled neck. Here it is,

the beautiful broken clavicle (and he is
now a weight, wide awake, and looks at me
with my own deep, brown eyes),


the proper pecs of the more
proper son, the one who should have
been, but never was; don’t get me wrong

it’s not Achilles come to collect remains
of Patroclus, but it’s damn near close.
What’s left for four and twenty years,

or more, is simply this: to recollect,
forget, then recollect again, forget again,
then rest and mourn.