Absorption of Light
JoLee G. Passerini
Absorption of Light
We don’t take a year for grief.
The dark-bordered letter and the deep-flounced
mourning dress are things I haven’t got.
Telephones speak the afternoon’s arrivals.
The day edges toward darkness
and a drive in the country, where angus cows
are solid as anything I can imagine
beneath the storm’s blue underbelly.
Home is iron pans, charred bread,
and 78s revolving as they scratch out
a solo. So thick, they might hold everything
I ever want to hear: poker chips,
molasses, or my dead father’s shoes,
or dominoes, double blank, a dragon’s tongue
on the back curling like a dream.
On the new-paved interstate, a wreck has traffic
stilled for miles. One by one,
drivers switch their engines off.
The trucks are all vibration, darker
blocks of bulk outlined by amber lights,
burnt diesel drifting into the moonless sky.
And here, at the only bar in town,
the dark is closing down on us like ships,
great hulls along a broken shoreline.
JoLee G. Passerini holds an MFA from the University of Alabama. She teaches writing at Eastern Florida State College. Her work has appeared most recently in Bellevue Literary Review, Rattle, O-Dark-Thirty, and DIAGRAM.