Lesley Wheeler

Bequest

One door is his will. He leaves me

nothing, not even my name

in the list of his surviving children.

One door is a folded standard

the honor guard hands his widow, next

of kin, no kin to me. It’s only cotton

but weighed down with stars. My father once

carved a Möbius strip in wood, a triangle

with rounded corners and one continuous

surface. He gave it to me, or I took it, I can’t

remember. Its impossible interior

a portal. A book is always a door:

his Bible, inscribed First Reformed

Sunday School, Brooklyn, 1934.

Behind the title page, in boyish pencil,

Job 19:21 skin of teeth.

In fact, that’s 19:20, a tale of escape.

21 implores: Have pity upon me, O ye

my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me.

A threshold where I pause and think: be

empty. Your inheritance is nothing. Feel

it in your muscles, the heaviness of vacancy.

Trace with your finger its curious property

of one-sidedness. Souvenir of air.

First published by Barrow Street Review

What They Don’t Say

Life in us was like water in a river:

that’s Thoreau via Lowell. It may rise higher

this year. The copperheads may writhe on a ledge

of exposed shale lapped by current. An eyebrow-ridge

smacked by little waves. Life surging out

of ducts, seeping from nail-beds, rushing each sheet

of paper, foaming with pollutants. You think

it sounds good, the high life, this water-mark,

but it’s messy. What they don’t say is how

you ooze from every orifice: that’s Amelia,

nobody you should know, on the days

after childbirth. A father’s death flows

hard too, spooks the snakes, even when you feel

the world’s better off.  Your banks torn away.

First published by Poetry Congeries

My Dead Father Remembers My Birthday

Dream-phone rang and I thought: that’s exactly

his voice. I haven’t forgotten. Then: but I could

forget, because he’s dead. Hi, sorry it’s been so long,

but I was sick and the doctors messed everything up.

He made that shrug-noise, dismissive but pained,

meaning he’s lying or leaving something out.

It’s snowing here, and then a click, click, over the line,

and a neutral woman’s voice, slightly officious:

This recording was intercepted. If you wish to replay

this message, dial this number now, and she recited

a blizzard of digits while I flailed

for a pen then found myself tangled in blankets.

The window a bruise beginning to fade. 

Here mist wreaths the trunks. In a few months

snow will crisp the grass, insulate and numb the oaks

with feathery layers that would soak and freeze

a human being. When and where is he? Snug,

maybe, watching weather through double panes.

Or wanting to be. I heard a bead of doubt

suspended in his voice, a cool guess he’d missed

something, before my operator intervened,

reason declaring: This is memory. The line is cut.

First published by New Ohio Review

© Lesley Wheeler

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