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The Willow Grove
by Laurie Sheck

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The Unfinished

We were characters in a story
the writer couldn’t bring himself to finish.
When he left us it was late, a child
was crying, newsprint smudged on our fingertips
as if to make of us a mechanism
by which the world would repeat itself, its story:
this happened—did you hear?—then that.
So many disparate versions. The terror
risen into words, shrouded there, hanging, so cold.
And the tenderness—how the words barely touched it,
as if to speak it were a further hurt.
It was night when he left us,
and the child who could not yet remember her dreams
woke saying, where are the toys of the moon,
are we the moon’s toys? Outside, lines
of stiff trees stood like hieroglyphs,
the configuration of the one for dagger
so close to the one that stands for shrub,
so hard to understand the difference;
or the one for fear that also could mean
reverence, the one for medicine so similar
to entreaty and to prayer.
And in the distance the red tremor
of the radio tower, and the planes that passed above us
as we held to the earth and didn’t understand the earth.

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