another poem, "Sand in my Eye"

Mark Chartier

Sand in my Eye (C) 2006

I thought of you today:
The faces on the sidewalk
Passed like channels switching on a TV.
Mr. McCue handed me a soggy brown paper bag
Of French Fries. When I poured vinegar over them, some
Seeped onto the paper cuts on my hand.
I didn’t care though, I was writing you
A letter. I didn’t know to where, I just was,
And the sting reminded me how.

Ray was pushing her little cousin on the swing.
Clovey was around 3, and her hair was a honey brown,
Like the Maple leaves shriveling on the branches above the monkey bars.
Her hair rippled through the wind, her legs kicking sand in Ray’s eyes.
Higher she shrieked, waving her hands toward the Alaskan-shaped cloud.

I wondered if our daughter would have looked like her.
It’s been ten months since you left,
And the only one I trust is the hand that pushes the snooze on my alarm.
I’ve gotten so used to taking pills to sleep,
That I’ve forgotten what comes after Sunday.
And when I cry, I don’t cry because you left at 3 in the morning
On a whistling bus, or because you won’t call,
But because the last time we made love, I wanted to bag your tears
In my hand and squelch them with the snap of my wrist,
Because I wanted to sleigh my hand down the skew
Between your ear and your shoulder,
Plug into your brain and see what city was on your mind,
What you would’ve named our baby.
That night, you wouldn’t let me touch your legs,
You said because you hadn’t shaved in three days,
But maybe you were saving a piece of yourself that wanted to run.
I remember tracing your areola with the straight-edged
Fingernail of my pinky,
My hands tip-toeing down the small of your back.
While you were on top, you bobbed your head upward,
Like you were worshipping the ceiling fan,
When you looked back down at me, some sweat drizzled onto my chest,
You were wearing eye-liner,
Though I liked seeing the wrinkles in your eye-lids,
They showed a cruel wisdom in progress:
That you, like I, aren’t impenetrable to time, but victims of its jester.

Clovey walked over to me.
She wasn’t scared by the pin-balling of my pupils, or the tremor of my hand,
But looked at me, like a kitten eyeing a ball of yarn, and grabbed a fry.
She started coughing, crying, reached her arms up to me,
And said, “I hold you.”
Her coughs were darling like hiccups from pebbles being thrown in a pond.
When I picked her up,
Ray’s mom came over and told me I looked good
With a baby girl in my arms.
I wanted to look down at the paper where I had written your name,
But all I could see were Clovey’s lime green eyes,
And me falling into the tear That should’ve been mine.