Elegy on a Vanishing
It’s strange the way my past now vanishes with theirs.
The things they used to ask about— my wife, my home, my writing, my work—
have made a gradual fade, like a slant of late-day light.
No more newspaper clippings or mailed notes written in block print.
No more phone calls or emails or texts. Their world now: a few small rooms
and the much smaller compartments of pill boxes marked with days of the week.
I could be someone else’s son, a character in the last novel they read.
Like the exterior paint of their tiny ranch— blue beneath gray beneath yellow
beneath pink, I must lie, though, in their layered thoughts.
When they fly through their dreams in their frequent naps,
do they scan the moonlit seaboard for the small town where I live?
It’s hard to forgive how we disappear together in this.
Doppelgänger
Only right that I saw him fresh out of a dream—
this short, bald, bearded man the spitting image of me.
I lay half in the sun, drool on my chin.
The ocean: a concussion. The thousand roaring voices
and synesthetic colors: a mescaline buzz.
That my Mauis were salt-smudged was the first explanation
for why I saw myself kneeling in the foam
with a girl no more than four and a boy no more than two,
the three of us dripping mud into futile minarets.
My arms awake again, I took off the shades—
It was me, alright, but a me I sometimes wished I was.
That was the second explanation.
Breakwater
Gary J. Whitehead’s fifth book of poetry, Seeing Double, will be published in May. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Parnassus, and The New Criterion. He’s received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the Anne Halley Poetry Prize from the Massachusetts Review. He lives in northern New Jersey.