by Paul French

Created on: November 12, 2008   Last Updated: February 16, 2010

Chalice

I'll figure it out

She says dryly and uncontestable

Like a cup to the brim with nothing.

The future shakes her hand

But it never kisses, never beckons, nor bows,

Her cup is empty after all; always-is-has-been-will.

Been daily drunk? Yeah, long time ago, she says for her story

A story about Meth and the kids she sold it to

About reform and namedropping Jesus

And about sundry sordid things

Like domestic disturbances

And teeth falling out

From knuckles and drugs

I'm slapping deli down

Cutting, preparing, watching the work-clock only so mindful

And she's relaying her entire sibilant history to me

Through the gaps of five crooked obsidian teeth.

And the dead-end evaluations of what will -

That also hisses through

Floods past the poor dam of teeth

Broken by that history I don't care to hear.

I wish she would save some of it for herself,

Keep some to float away on.

I'll figure it out, she finishes up.

It's an awful thing to see her,

An elder so open and unreserved

So angled to a possibly open ear

Pouring it all out for me, a person mostly

Foreign to her contents,

Soaking me so I won't be thirsty

But I am.

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