LEMON SILENCE

This morning the dentist. She scraped my old teeth

clean like a Roman monument or the Sacré Coeur

in Montmartre where Stendahl and Zola rest. Every

spring in Paris they start washing her north of the main

gate and reach the other side a year later only to see

she’s already blackened where they began. You left

me a lemon on the doorstep. It seemed all spring we set

up camp every night to pull it down again in the morning

each day we got faster got faster at tearing things down

I took comfort from the great poet who wrote angels

cannot distinguish between the living and the dead.

On the stone steps the lemon you left.

Juncos’ nest in the hanging basket by the front door

greeted me for a month with their tsktsktsk warning calls

facing me from roof or birch branches whether I

was leaving or coming home. Shady place. Plant shaggy.

Greens pouring out along the sides like a waterfall.

My Puerto Rican friend says these birds are lucky signs

in his country—are we not now both of us American

born or otherwise included—when he smashed his car,

black blossoms on his torso. Could no longer speak.

Luck is to know which silence hurts and which doesn’t.

PUBLISHED IN SWWIM, OCTOBER 6, 2022