Verge & Exodus by Ann E. Michael

 

Image | Tetyana Kovyrina

Verge & Exodus

 

On the road’s verge, five geese looking unctuous,

​vaguely irritable as I pass them

going 50 on the route I’ve taken for decades

 

and this time I recall two years back, when my dad

​was failing, how eagerly I sought any sign

of seasonal change—

 

early-flowering witch hazel or crocuses, quince,

​swells in daffodils’ green emergence 

while inside myself the slow emergency of his dying

 

began to open from probable to imminent. Back then

​I drove south idly; through the windshield 

I looked forward to nothing, 

 

as my mother talked of nothing when he floated 

​in his haze of pain and Dilaudid, holding one hand 

over his head as though he could, 

 

with his fingertips, pull the ache from his left ear 

​over his head and into the room 

where it might exit.

 

Now, the exodus occurs elsewhere, in refugee waves,

​people whose minds and bodies lug their different pains

across other kinds of borders.

 

My father’s experience of earth has ended,

​his baptism complete. His birthday was in April.

See there, along the roadside? Daffodils.

© Ann E. Michael 

Ann E. Michael

Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection (2024) is Abundance/Diminishment. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, One Art, Ekphrasis Review, and many others, as well as in numerous anthologies. She chronicles her writing, reading, and garden on a long-running blog at www.annemichael.blog.

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