The Bent Hinge of Your Arm
That’s the thing,
to love in spite of it all:
the traffic, the melting ice caps,
the deaf ears—
and still allow someone
to nestle into the bent hinge of
your arm and
to there generate heat—
to feel the weight of someone’s
skull—
those are the things:
the heat, the weight, the skull.
But it’s all Death, really.
to love in the face of Death
to love even though the language
we use isn’t enough to
light the dark parts of the universe
to know that what we call love
is but a scratched match in
the blackness of night—
that’s the thing:
to let someone in when
we just don’t know.
The Weight of a Used Book Purchased at a Small Book Shop in York Beach, Maine
Someone had folded
the page down
at the corner like you do
when you
want to remember.
I didn’t notice until
much later:
small circle of lamplight
in the damp night,
whispering surf pushing an
aroma of salt up
through the blackness
filtered by porch screens.
I read something—
an idea worth noting,
and when I dog-eared the
page it bent easily
along the memory
of the previous crease,
someone else’s moment of
clarity:
there is no second chance to
be bathed in the light of
life’s meaning.
And now I bear this
added burden, this questioning,
this wondering if we two,
a stranger and I,
have missed our chances.
DEAN CHARPENTIER is a writer and teacher living in North Andover, MA, where he was a recent winner of the Anne Bradstreet Poetry Contest. His poetry has appeared in Wild Roof Journal, Expressionist Magazine, Eunoia Review, and English Journal; his fiction in Fiction Southeast; and his essay in Andovers Magazine. He has spent an over-30-year career in education attempting to chip away at the canon from the inside, like escaping from Shawshank. Accomplices in this mission are wife Lori, daughter Taylor, son JP, and pandemic goldendoodle Odin, whose barking would surely give them all up in a zombie apocalypse. Nonetheless, they will keep him.