Thursday Poem

Hospital Parking Lot, April

Once there was a woman who laughed for years uncontrollably after a stroke.

Once there was a child who woke after surgery to find his parents were impostors.

These seagulls above the parking lot today, made of hurricane and ether, they

have flown directly out of the brain wearing little blue-gray masks, like strangers' faces, full

of wingéd mania, like television in waiting rooms. Entertainment. Pain. The rage

of fruit trees in April, and your car, which I parked in a shadow before you died, decorated now with feathers,

.  

and unrecognizable  

with the windows unrolled  

and the headlights on  

and the engine still running  

in the Parking Space of the Sun.
.

by Laura Kasischke
from Poetry, Vol. 193, No. 1, October, 2008