After Dusting a Bookshelf

 

In Daniel Chester French's Studio

After Dusting a Bookshelf

 

Tell me how long this small chocolate

egg has been perched on Robert

Lowell’s Collected Poems ready for the find,

sitting on his spine, edging his ladies’

man eye-

 

brow?  Missed. When? Last Easter?  Easter

before?  There was a time, when he was

manic, and maybe even between

manias, that he believed

in Easter, or in its least,

its implications, in the hours & days   

following the final slump, God's lungs giving up,

the criminal forgiven, the criminal

not, & the squeeze of each between.  Jesus seeking

what I can and will say every kid seeks

from their own

father: presence.  To not have to 

say why have you

abandoned me?  It reminds me, and this is

a stretch of time and a context out of transition,

but bear with me,

to say I remember seeing,

& needing to believe in it

as a possibility, the first film I saw reeled

backwards.  Its end its beginning.

I believed I could live 

backwards.  And then,

I wanted to believe I could live

backwards.  Become

new.  But...you know, 

time.

And so.  I see this little egg, how it is

sunk to gunk under its foil.  Lowell is

impatiently unread, spine unspread, 

his skunk unborn or slunk

off, or his Nantucket dead yet

living maybe.  And speaking

of living backwards, I make myself see 

the fingers pinching this candy to place back-

ward and then for-

ward: the three to five second delight

a tongue might need to light its ennui

to strike the foil of gold, God

has it been

years sitting there? Tell me it has been

waiting unseen for at least

the length of time it takes to stumble

and be lifted, 

then sit in the confessional or the tomb

(they’re both the same, in some way,

right?)

ageless and out of date and say, almost

breathless:

Father please bless me, please, 

bless me