Saul Bennett
17
I loved learning William Carlos Williams
interned at the Manhattan hospital
where decades after I was born;
- feeling him feeling his way
around rounds there, watching him tip
toe out of Mother's room-to-be with me;
- imagining on his way out
he had a poem notion, scratched it down there,
then, distracted, dropped his scrap;
- dreaming it undiscovered there,
implanted, invisible over time
inside a baseboard crack;
(loving, but not so much, because it happens
all the time, Williams wondering
where in hell his fragment fell.)
- believing Mother about to depart
chased her fallen eyebrow pencil
to the leaking crack, spotted scrap, knelt there;
- observing Mother dropping
Williams into her purse
before a Checker brought us three and Father home;
- pretending 40 years after her death,
nodding over Mother's keepsakes,
exhuming the faded, inked jumble;
- decrypting his skeletal poem,
ascribing those bones irrefutably to Williams,
thanks due Mother, who routinely rescued small things.