Kim Triedman
What Stays

And beneath it the lives lived, the sure-footed,
the rain. This is my

neighborhood: beige strangers in beige houses,
gutters full of leaves. Stay awhile—
you will see: the postman,
hulking, a name that
no one knows; the widower across the street
out after dark
to mow his lawn. There is a

plan, but barely: the hum
of bees, a loosening of earth, or just
the northwest wind like death itself come
rattling the panes. Never mind

the faces in the windows— they change
and change and houses too and flags
go up and down. Only the sky

remains like some kind of
trusty old custodian— keeping watch,
whispering to himself, never forgetting
to check in with the moon
before turning out the lights.

Casseroles

It has always been a kind of life—
drawbacks, cars and kids, chicken for dinner;
even a Scottish maid who lost her teeth then
moved away. What can I say? My mother
loved me, the beds were high and wide and
piled thick with quilts; and the mornings they were
damp with dew. Yet still I waken in the night
with shaking hands. And winters, too: they’re
so much longer than they used to be.

Answer me this: where do we put it all?
The pieces, I mean—sofas, guilt, the price
of gas—all of it tossed together like so many
Sunday casseroles. Nothing but a
lifetime can contain it: no box or poem
long enough, no perfect proof. All those loose
ends, those partial truths; memories long and
snarled as New York City nights. There is no
orbit here, no perfect round—none of it proceeds
as one might reasonably expect, like a novel
that circles back to the beginning again,
a good novel, even the tiniest details
resurrected; accounted for.

_ _

Kim Triedman’s first collection, bathe in it or sleep, won the 2008 Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition and was named semi-finalist for the 2008 Black River Chapbook Competition. She was a semi-finalist for the 2008 Parthenon Prize for Fiction.

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