Never Stop Moving & Other Poems
Never Stop Moving
There was a hot dog stand
up the highway, Route 6,
that brought us happiness.
It didn’t take much at that age—
strong mustard. We took a break
painting our rental in the woods,
a starter home that stood below the
landlord’s A-frame like a dog awaiting
its leash. We’d fought that morning,
our first of many that boiled up each time
we moved, which happened every nine months,
give or take, for the next six years, as if we were
fleeing creditors or some inescapable curse,
the kind that follows you everywhere, like wights
or ladybugs. We always expected the next new spot
would be our last, a three-seasoner by the lake
we stretched to four, that miniature birdhouse
perched on stilts, or the dank cottage where black
spores encrusted every stray sock underbed.
Leases break easily when you’re broke.
Somehow we never learned to hold onto
the boxes, so every time we had to buy more
from the big box store, wheeling them flat
on a dolly across the tar-scarred lot to your car.
Our car, I suppose. Or almost. That was when
you misread the message from Lowe’s
exhorting consumers toward endless improving,
receiving instead a command to never cease moving,
as if we were neutrinos or newborn sharks
who needed instructions. Later, laughing,
we would recite that messed-up refrain,
a slogan against slowing down or resting
overlong, with its ominous intimations
that to pause, only for a moment, might risk
an opening, an invitation for an ending—
right as almost everything was about to begin.
A New Bed
1
Below
the stainless
shank of moon
a steel shovel leans
against the fence, shining
like a licked spoon.
A path descends
in muddied somnolence
and wet leaves, where wary
stoma stare without welcome.
Somewhere I read
it is best to dig
new beds by night.
2
Eighty miles upriver
in a small town distrustful
of transplants, refugees
arrive in offseason surges—
A survivor, I found my way
here with a last-minute listing
and the bones of a sweet defeated
smile, passkey for every passing
stranger, tumblers snapping into
place like chambered rounds.
3
I kneel in the dirt.
In my pocket are damp
pouches with pictures
of marigold and squash.
They say early spring is prime
for planting, for new beginnings,
as solitary cells burst mitotic into pairs,
into petals and blooms and boughs—
a slow surprise of color, opened cautiously
like a box of keepsakes or the contents
of closets left for your children to collect:
your skirts and shirts and camisoles,
the flowery quilt you banished from our bodies,
unable to breathe beneath its weight.
Seed scatters like bits of broken
teeth, lost in the loam—
a field unfallowed.
An Itch in Two Acts
Scratching the Surface
Sleepless, you summoned blood
to the touch, startling your skin
in angry sanguineous streaks
into the folds where they infested,
webbed between fingers and toes,
between joints of limb and cropped
crest of pelvic curls, invisible flesh-
cutters with explicit appetites:
Sarcoptes scabiei. Borne from
some borrowed bed, escorted
to my room one long weekend
at school, egg-laying arachnids
that (unlike us) thrived in tight
quarters of old institutions.
We scarcely spoke. Instead
I lay suspended by your side
in a static field of silent tension,
headache humming from discount
wine, hidden hives teeming inside.
Even now, it’s hard to make sense
of how much was left unsaid. Barely
beyond larval in matters of my own life,
I imagined our private thoughts
and petty crimes could be decoded
by the wretched rhythm of your nails.
You tore your poor self to pieces.
We hadn’t learned to ask for what
we wanted—a salve, a sense of
understanding, forgiveness. Loosed
desires tunneled into our lives and
later loves with the persistency of mites.
The Common Itch
A sensation defined
by the desire to relieve it.
Skipping across pain
receptors, elusive blip
on the lip of perception,
triggering a response
more injurious than the
tingle extinguished—
Having lost that feeling,
he claims it’s impossible
to rekindle. His lawyer
concurs, calculating fees,
irreconcilable, no fault…
Though his wife’s petition
tolls a different knell: slow
decades of excoriation, that
aching scrape, abandonment—
her spouse caught crossing
a salted sea of other skin.
An itch can’t be made
from scratch, regardless
how rigorous the act.
Friction’s no substitute
for frisson. An irritant
is needed, burn or bite
or poisoned petiole,
any one of a thousand
arousing stimuli prickling
the spine like a chorus line,
before the body, unsettled,
craves contact, begs again
for the nearest hand.
Where does it go,
that vestigial urge?
Veiled within until
something stings.
John Powers lives with his wife and sons in the Hudson Valley of New York. His writing has appeared in Rust & Moth, Full Bleed, Brink, Wired and The New York Times Magazine. Find him here online: www.johnpowers.info.
