Birthday Poem [XXI]

Another trip around the sun
& somebody gets you an ice cream cake.
I should think about learning to drive
so I can go get one from Holy Cow
myself, or really, so I can be
the one-trick-pony in our no-
horse-town. Town where an old
sneaker, standing alone on any
one of the four corners in said
town could look beautiful
just being a shoe among people,
watching people. People
dreaming into each other
like fish do in water. Barefoot
people on the corner
of the launderette, standing
in puddles & asking: What
will be about this weather?
Or really: Will tonight be as humid
as it was when we met?
Some days the dark isn’t so much
of a scary place as it is raw shadow,
& even then, not in oh-so-many
words, that shadow isn’t really
a shadow at all. Just a shoe
going on about the weather.
A solitary mind bending
in toward itself, questioning
finicky things of a brain that somehow
managed to name itself a brain.
Driving student yielding quickly
for a blackbird walking.
These characters get the gist of it,
that darkness. That here,
there could never be such
a thing as silence (seeing as
there could never be such a thing
for the boney fish with the
ridiculous dangling headlight as water).

_________

Gilad Jaffe is an Editorial Assistant at Conjunctions and the recipient of a 2019 Academy of American Poets Prize. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Fugue, Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, TriQuarterly as well as the anthology DW Cities: Manhattan (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, U.K.), among others. He lives in Tivoli, NY, where he is a student at Bard College.