Dent

You must convince yourself 
you know better than life. You know better 

than soot or algae’s wet sigh. And the child 
you might’ve had or been, 

who drank brine and left 
the olives jarred. 

He would draw the lines, would mark 
the years himself. He’s never seen 

the vines that, unlooked for 
for centuries, sparred the light 

for the windows and won. 
Now to open the grate 

you have to unhook the ground 
from the ground. 

Most days you leave it be. 
You allow what can survive you. 

Whatever of you can survive. 
Rarely you notice 

some trace of your body, which, 
in your absence, continues. 

As debt continues. 
Rot, the house, a buzzing shadow 

from the screen door to the bedroom so 
thick the flies split or are shunned 

and go to corners to die. 
They die in pairs. People bristle from you 

on the street, if they look. 
The truck driver exhales flat smoke 

and it breathes into a keyhole. 
You plod past a little boy wearing 

a red dress and he nods at you, 
tips his horns of red felt. 

Copyright © 2024 by Gaia Rajan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 22, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“Utopia is a violent fiction: to imagine a past coherence confines us to a perpetual state of self-purification, corrosive not so much to our fallibility as our humanity. Injury, degeneration, drift—what might it mean to envision these terms, not as markers of the proliferating impossibility of a good future, but as alternate methods of negotiating the present? A forbearance, to learn to desire rupture rather than its illusory prehistory.”
—Gaia Rajan