The Inconstants
So, it’s an unusual noun, but still
it’s semantically perfect.
There are those…. Well,
it happens too often to be sometimes.
It can be caused by an instant of perpendicular suspension
or a languid, vacuous interruption.
It nevertheless is a betrayal like an uncomfortable jacket
that binds, restraint familiar.
There’s no hope here of injecting laughter as in an
old sitcom.
Nothing is scripted.
The phone line stretches into the evening without
vibration.
I answer anyway every few minutes just to keep in practice.
The story is old and new:
It’s Elijah fleeing Jezebel into the wilderness of
Beersheba,
a prince giving up the crown and obeisance for
the promise of love,
a Georgia mortician, filling funeral urns with concrete dust, or
a friend, an associate, who suddenly reveals
a less than worthy estimation of character, yours, either spoken or silent.
It’s an oscillation, an arrhythmia, and an arc that doesn’t spark, the visible
fault line of an earthquake.
Sometimes short lived like static; more often not.
Recreants, quitters,
the motives are different: fear, love, greed, revenge, laziness, ennui; the
separation is ever the difference between familiarity, responsibility
and its opposite.
I still wait for the return letter. A lifetime.
I will check the postal cove again today.
Hello. Hello.
.
Ann Power is a retired faculty member from The University of Alabama. She enjoys writing historical sketches as well as poems based in the kingdoms of magical realism. Her work has appeared in: Spillway, Gargoyle Magazine, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Dappled Things, The Copperfield Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The Loch Raven Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Amethyst Review, and other publications. She was nominated for Best of the Net in Poetry for her poem, “Ice Palace.”
.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 