Neil Carpathios

Revealed

Because the doll in the lighted shop window kept staring.
Because the bloody meat hanging from a hook at the butcher’s
     dripped as we passed.
Because a little further the mannequin in another window
     resembled the doll all grown up.
Because of the buildings, the lampposts, the sewer
     and the lack of curtains to hide us —

we started to feel the barb of the hook we hung from
     we couldn’t see.

Message

Sometimes you stop in the middle of a moment:
put the book down or just stand in the room
forgetting where you were headed.

Marble-still, you feel like a chandelier
waiting to be lit;

or like a dog whose hearing hears
what you can’t, you lean toward eternity,
straining for the evidence.

Arthritis

Pain in the spine and sides.
     My wife diagnoses the problem.
But I’m sure it is ghost birds
     who feed on the seeds of every moment I lived
    
but was not awake to
     fluttering behind the bony cage of my ribs.
Inevitable, aging we say.
     But the body knows we squander
    
seconds, minutes, hours, days —
     leafing through magazines
full of photos of people
     we imagine being,
   
rich and famous;
     or staring at a TV screen;
or driving from point A to point B
     to feel we’re getting somewhere —

instead of walking across the room
     and taking the one we love in our arms,
looking into their eyes;
     or stepping out into cool air
    
gazing up at clouds,
     how they form miracle images
on a giant canvas for us;
     or even sitting silently
          
listening to the heart’s echo
     in the deep well of the body
where those birds fill us, fighting,
     pecking each other over those seeds —

which hurts inside —
     which we name,
thinking we know all about living
     and why it hurts to grow old.