Poetry Forum

Endgame


The day Clay broke his mirror,
he divided his room into seven parts.

Clay took his grandfather’s hammer
to his mirror:
a good weight.

He heard the voice of God
calling for that hammer,
telling him to throw out all his shirts.

Clay and God went back a long way.

Clay was painfully
unbreaking his mirror,
fishing his photo albums from the trash.
His TV set reappeared.
Several thousand dollars in hospital bills
reentered his bank account.
Some sunny days lost their hard edge.

Clay had never fasted, never
found out about suicide.

Clay was reading books again.
His sofa
lost its rumpled look. The carpet
grew fresher. Time was spinning like a bullet.

This was the endgame. The planet tilted in its orbit.
Clay and God were not speaking. Clay
packed his pills into a small box and prepared for life.

Very much like the closing line John. The poem does have a restorative vigour, though time spinning like a bullet makes me doubt that summation.

Thanks, Phil! The closing line seemed a propos.

Spinning like a bullet - not sure how that got in there. There's a lot of spinning in the MS., atoms, planets, galaxies and so forth.

Cheers,
John