Robert Lavett Smith- Three Poems

IN MEMORY OF THEM ALL

How insidiously death

seeps into every corner

of my world, like a shadow,

a stain, the stale smell

of winter sunlight.

At dusk, at the moment

when mauve surrenders

to black, those who are gone

return, as darkness smudges

the edges of the ineffable.

So they come back:

Jaimes, the brilliant poet

wasted to a skeleton by ALS,

speechless that final night

save for an eloquence in his eyes.

 

Victor, gentle Deadhead,

killed by a drunk driver

as he walked his pit bull puppy

in the woods near Santa Rosa,

a hundred yards from the shoulder.

 

Sophie, murdered by friends

in a dispute over a man,

her dismembered,

decomposing body buried

under a hedge in Golden Gate Park.

Mike, dead thirteen days

after a stitch in his side

proved to be cancer,

his internal organs

hopelessly compromised.

 

My gracious wife Pat,

the growth in her brain,

against all expectations,

abruptly erupting

in a blaze of blood.

 

There is nothing to do

about any of this,

so I write these words—

a futile gesture, I know—

in memory of them all.

LYING IN BED
 
I’ve been thinking about
this respiratory infection
like a damp avalanche
in my lungs for weeks,
considering the mundane
misery of an afternoon
which announces itself,
through drawn blinds,
as achingly clear light,
in spite of everything.


THE TENSION AT THE TABLE

 

If only Jesus, broken on the Cross,

Could have foreseen the tension at the table—

The forced, tight smiles almost intolerable—

The butchered egos and the sense of loss.

Our faces bloodied by cranberry sauce

We hide our rage as well as we are able,

Conviviality, at best, unstable:

This season proffers pain, the rest is dross.

Oh, Lord, now is the dark night of the soul,

When days grow short, and tempers, shorter still.

Though none are truly maimed, no one is whole;

The cutlery is honed as if to kill.

So pass the turkey and the buttered rolls,

Endure this martyrdom each must fulfill.

 

 

Raised in New Jersey, Robert Lavett Smith has lived since 1987 in San Francisco, where for the past sixteen years he has worked as a Special Education Paraprofessional. He has studied with Charles Simic and the late Galway Kinnell. He is the author of several chapbooks and three full-length poetry collections, the most recent of which is The Widower Considers Candles (Full Court Press, 2014).Two poems from this newest book have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.