Author | Michael Sandler I acted childishly on that sunset ride * Kleos: renown from a feat heard by others, remembered an ephemeral boundary dividing for I’m like others in hoping some notable act of family anecdote a child might recite, even if not something of account, as if an account and off, its memory soon the lacuna in an arc impressing itself on a reader whose response endures in an ocean of text swelling from the unfathomed. something of me has not slipped a mental sprocket * In the waiting room, a glossy brochure like a cataract’s beclouding of a lens, and bathes, salves my road rash, asks me the date, though of course it is. A vacancy impaled I still recall some stories about an aunt, and my blanking out about their childhoods Michael Sandler’s poems have appeared in more than 30 journals, including California Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Zone 3. For his day job, he works in the Seattle area as an arbitrator.
Lacunae
racing a helping tailwind, and time—
forgetful hiss of slicks on macadam,
the daydream clicking through spokes of an interim,
dunes and sea amorphous, the salt air blurred.
The medics said a pavement crack may have jarred
vestiges of control: the let-go bars,
a helmet thump, my sitting up to inquire,
Which way is home?, a vocal thrummed to tremors.
and passed along after the mind has crossed
illumination and shade, me and not me,
will be intertwined with my name, a monument
noteworthy to chronicler, blind poet, or Wikipedia,
might be more than a screenshot flicking on
toward the unborn; or an attempt at art
until it, too, dissolves and diffuses
Still it would reassure to know
to be dragged by faceless shades on an unmarked course.
reassures me that a sunset radiates
even as a day’s lessenings accrue—
the odd neuron misfires, a synapse out
a crosshatching of crow’s-feet near the eyes,
my child’s face thickening, unrecognized—
or déjà vu? At last, a nurse summons
where we are, to repeat a string of numbers
that seem to vanish in a gaping pit,
then says, Don’t worry, it’s not like Alzheimer’s,
like a trepan in my life today—
won’t someone shout, You won the stage, as I smile
at the erased? What Hector did I slay?
a grandfather, but have let slip a slew
of events and names. I hear my kids lament
each revisit of those skeletal ruins…
like a cyclist unable to stay attentive.
Beside the unclaimed dead at memory’s rim,
I look to them to keep my name from dimming.About the Author
