Janice Lynch Schuster

What did we need of lectures and books?

I had the syllabus of your body

The blackboard of your skin.

You contained everything I wanted to know.

From you, the periodic table of the heart

and the mysterious language of love.

From you, the formula to calculate

distance and longing, volume and force.

You were a canon of experience

an encyclopedia of the unknown.

All night, I studied you.

By day, we slept and dreamt,

Wrote papers of our connection

Typed a universe with our hands.

She longs for trees and night

Both left behind for the land

Of midnight sun. She had not expected

To live out a century on the cusp of America.

Born in the nation’s capital

This place so foreign to her.

She misses the long walks from Brentwood

To shops on H Street, she misses

Her childhood, her brother, the bed

They shared in the crowded living room.

She remembers the wind, the day

A tornado ripped Bladensburg

And she and Billy huddled in a ditch

While fences blew skyward above them.

Here she is so far from her own life.

Loneliness has carved a space

Beside her, and behind. She prays

And sometimes God whispers in her ear.

Memories fill her time. There is little else

Except a corner for her crossword puzzle

And her books. Her great-grandchildren,

15 of them, congregate in her thoughts.

She cannot keep them straight.

She is bent 90 degrees to the ground

Which one day will take her old bones

And heart and send them home.