Reference Department

 

Each day is filled with queries.

Desperate or trivial it’s all the same:

needing answers, they imagine I might be hiding them

between my blunt peasant fingers. Sometimes with luck

I may just stumble upon something that resembles what’s required—

I may teach them how to fish,

show them a way to the enlightenment

they recklessly imbue in me.

At times I merely flounder

and want to bury myself in mud.

 

If I have the time, and not the florid face-to-face,

I can always fill them with more than they could ever need:

links; citations; electronic databases;

photo copies from heavy volumes coated in dust;

a yellow 1963 Life magazine,

a motorcade rolling through Dealey Plaza,

on a cover that crumbles  

like a pressed flower

forgotten for 45 years.

 

I hope they realize there are few answers that are final,

and sometimes I can offer only a bag of approximation

secured by fraying cord: we must rely on the almost,

on pretty much, and the arrow just outside the bull’s eye.

Our hermeneutics sometimes need corrective lenses—

the long and short of this need for certainty.

 

Sometimes I wake with a shock,

knowing the elegant solution I proffered

was really just a piece of myself.

And I know how very little I know:

as I cross the threshold of my home,

I stumble through each room searching

for the definitive book that refers me back to myself.

Having no idea where to look, I bang shins

and stub toes in the dark. Where to even begin?

I give all I can in my lack.

 

Our fetal grip on a greased logos

that could go one way or the other,

like this hallowed building I so love:

at times an ivory tower; at times a bus station with books.

But always willing to hazard an educated guess.

 

My beloved patrons,

it is the best I can do

in this almost approximate certainty of truth.

Indeterminate, yet always final

as I sign off, end the call,

or say goodbye to your face,

imparting a particular knowledge

that I can verify is only my own.

 

 

 

Reckoning

 

There are leaves not yet turned

holding to the folly of green permanence.

For 8 years I watched you go off to sleep

in that separate room and imagined your dreams

might take us beyond this stasis,

you might yearn for these thick thighs

and gentle touch that I swear I still possessed.

We cobbled together a faith in aesthetics: rich orange drapes

against the deep blue walls of my room. My very own room

to lift my soul, against the swallowed ash of yearning.

These hopes of consolation, never spoken.

My 8 year exile from your glottal stop snore,

the warmth of your body. The intimacy that cooled

like the Friday dinners I made for you, the china,

the Bordeaux, the candles I had to snuff

as you ran late yet again. A pathetic plea to an intimacy

you could not summon, as we ate our cold dinner

and retired to our rooms. A child, I consoled my rage

with the bright colors of your mollification

to my infant need. The leaves turned and in a moment

you were nothing, as you had made yourself to be.

I left, yet 3 years now, you are somehow the exact lack

I need. At times I now rock in place and chant: I will

give you that separate room, allow you that fear

of never saying what it was beneath the sternum.

I understand what you loved, why you did not want

a burden of truth. We're left with that shocked silence

in the seconds just after a car wreck, the road

a jewelry store of broken glass.

 

 

 

Rod Peckman lives in the glorious Pacific Northwest, and feels sad for those who have never seen its wonders. His work has appeared in Barnwood, Thieves Jargon, Babel Fruit, Clapboard House, Dark Sky Magazine, Juked, The Sylvan Echo, Silenced Press, and The Argotist Online. He works for a large library system and feels guilty about not giving his Yellow lab enough exercise.