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Look out!
Ruth Hoberman

Trees lean like slapstick clowns—clumsy, orange
and yellow, dropping nuts, leaves, twigs: this

is the tipsy time, when berries underfoot
ferment in purple blotches,

grey slabs of sidewalk shift, and the air heaves
with the sonorous roll of garbage bins,
the week’s discarded stink. Everything seethes,

seeps, slips until gravity grabs at flesh and you tumble—
matter, mindless and frail as a clay pot—
street, house, day no longer your own.

Why can’t a body float on air?

Rilke said there’s a hand that holds us all,
but last week in the Times, four different obituaries
named falls as cause of death. Everyone
has one waiting, a geriatrician told me once.

No bones broken this time, you say, gathering the shards
and brushing the leaf-litter off.

Only October. Still time to separate yourself from dust.

—
For thirty years, Ruth Hoberman taught English at Eastern Illinois University. Since her 2015 retirement, she has published poems and essays in such journals as Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, Smartish Pace, RHINO, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Ploughshares.

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Have you read these poems:
Ursa Major by J. Stephen Rhodes
A Thankful Tale by Bill Simmons

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