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Connecting
Glenn Pape

Sometimes all it takes
to reconnect with the world
is rolling down your car window
and drawing in the cool, quenching air.
Sometimes it’s stepping in gum
on the sidewalk.

Sometimes, when you wake,
the distance to solid ground is too great—
you swing your legs off the side of the bed
and watch the floor recede.
You feel like a stone dropped into a well
but never reaching the water below.

When my mother fell ill, I would call,
let the phone ring twenty times,
and then I’d call again. If she ever picked up
we would always repeat the same conversation:
the weather, the nurses, my siblings,
the miles between us, the casual “See you soon.”

Most days the phone would just keep ringing.

Sometimes all it takes is the smell of soup
simmering on a stove, the memory
of grated carrots, dappled broth,
tender chicken, and rye bread.

Sometimes it’s a bowl with a hairline crack
or a slow sidestep with downcast eyes

and a careless promise never kept.

—
Glenn Pape is a recently retired man attempting to age gracefully while sharing an old house in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and a lovable terrier mutt who looks like a cross between Bernie Sanders and a loofah. He loves Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby and the Chicago Cubs, no matter how much the latter may hurt. He began submitting his writing in earnest at the age of 50, and in the past few years he has been published in the North American Review, The Sun, Poet Lore, Pulp Literature, and The Rhysling Anthology, among others.

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Have you read these poems:
Fuse by Bart Edelman
In the Beginning by Norbert Hirschhorn

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