~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Ed Ruzicka

Anonymous

                        I

Often he is still in the oil-stained khakis

he wears to check seals, monitor pressure,

temperature, flow-rates at the plant.

In January the sun already cowers

behind buildings, streets

cast with complex shadows

by the time his headlights

sweep the backyard.

She is waiting.

Earlier his sister, his wife or both

helped his broken mother

down into tub water that is

by now no longer a balm

to hips, ribs, shoulders.

Once in the tub, she can not

get back up, is too much

to tug up into stand.

So she waits for her son.

Before he goes in, the women

drain the tub, drape her in the

threadbare decency of a towel.

The one she bore arches over her,

works one arm beneath

her wrinkled thighs and buttock.

She smells of wet leaves and ginger,

clings to him, withered arms

wreathed around his neck. Feet dangle.

There is a touch of grey

around his temples where the veins

pulse like lightning in the effort

of lifting her up from her bath,

that prime comfort she claims,

that which no one in the family

will deny her. As he lifts 

in a sort of reverse Pietà

his mother’s breath is on his neck.

He pauses for a second,

steadies himself, then carries her

out the door the way a groom

would cross a threshold in movie scenes

she saw when she was young.

She smells like wet leaves and ginger.

                        II

If there are prayers written

by any Thomas – Aquinas or Cramner—

that are more reverent than this

I do not know them. They

are absent from my tongue.

Let them stay in the silence

from which right prayers rise.

Let prayers go unsigned.

Between Late June and Geese

Between the first weeks of relentless scorching

   that lasted beyond any reckoning

   we have ever known until the earth

   grew angry and strangled many things

And the time when geese arrived back

   in our skies and on the shyly lapping

   shores of our lakes. In black night

   geese’s blasts shake stars. Between those times

Earth’s orbit tilted us away from the sun. The fibers

   of satsuma, spiders in vibrating webs, dew as it

   drenches fields, even sheets of paper on desks

   feel this, the removal of sun’s intensity. Feel

That decrease lift in every cell. Such loss is gain

Held in quiet and in speech upon our tongues.

The lightning-cracked pages of Ed Ruzicka’s third, full-length book of poems, Squalls (Kelsay Books), was released in March. Ed’s poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, the Chicago Literary Review, Rattle, Canary, and many other literary publications. Ed, who is also the president of the Poetry Society of Louisiana, lives with his wife, Renee, in Baton Rouge.