LOOKING BACK

I meant to return
long before this
but in looking back
we learn too much
of loss.
I dreaded that.

Now going through the house
and my parents’ lives
too revealed
by what they saved
what they left behind
for me to find
I feel nothing
but pain for the past
trying to separate
like old clothes
crumbling in a chest
what does not last
from what I can keep
trying to understand
how I fell
so short of what I intended
to do with my life.
How life twists and turns
against us. How a childhood
is not really understood
until it is lived
a second time
in memory.
How wonderful
and how terrible
it seems now
because it is gone
and because it was mine.

—from Rattle #14, Summer 1999

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Sarah Brown Weitzman

DESERT

—from Rattle #14, Winter 2000

__________

Sarah Brown Weitzman: “I began writing in 1977. After having over 200 poems published, I won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1984 and stopped sending out my work. I don’t know if there was a connection. I started submitting my poems again in 1999 and am finding it’s cold out there.”

ALGEBRA

Whenever I hear a train whistle
I think of someone leaving, always
leaving, never arriving. This
melancholy bent of mind can be
traced to high school algebra
where we studied problems of time
and space: “Two trains leave
from depots 107 miles apart.
One train travels at a rate of 29 mph
while the other at 77 mph.
At what point will they meet?”
For all I ever understood of algebra
the question might have been:
“Name the engineer.” So I would drift
into a different time and space
where real imagined dangers increased:
What if these two trains were traveling
on the same track and what if the signalman
forgot to switch the tracks and what if—
Oh, Lord, I’d pray, carried away, please don’t
let them collide! This was when the teacher
seeing how wide-eyed I’d become
would call on me.

—from Rattle #19, Summer 2003

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