RONALD J. PELIAS - POEMS

Ronald J. Pelias's work has appeared in a number of journals, including Midwest Poetry Review, Coal City Review, Poetry East,and Negative Capability. My most recent books, Leaning: A Poetics of Personal Relations (Left Coast Press/Routledge), Performance: An Alphabet of Performative Writing (Left Coast Press/Routledge), and If the Truth Be Told (Sense Publications), call upon the poetic as a research strategy.

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                                          Wish
 
 
Crawling toward
your final hour,
dragging a fool’s
history of
errors across
everyday’s sharp
glass, trying to
grab another
day, you utter
another wish
as if desire,
that sliver of
sun, might soon melt
your frozen heart.
 
 
 
 
                                       Final Years
 
 
Others walk around him
as if his age can’t be
touched
 
Others sit, fidgeting,
wondering when enough time
has gone by
 
Others speak, leaning in,
loud and slow, as if to a child
who won’t listen
 
Others attend, checking,
worried, concern
covering every word
 
Others drive, after buckling
him in, as if care equals
containment
 
Others show photographs
he can hardly see, believing
his life is memory
 
Others forget, as if stopping
for a moment
is the same as regret
 
 
                    What the Skeleton Resents
 
 
Being an object lesson, labels
pointing to all its parts, gathering dust
in doctor offices and school rooms,
or hanging from a limb on Halloween nights,
standing sentry at tombs of the unknown
 
being dependent upon the hinges,
the connecting links, how together
the parts would move, each twist calling
for another part’s turn, each reach carrying
the weight below, without asking for consent
 
being bound to protect the heart, the brain
knowing how they could suffer a blow, a crack,
to keep all safe, how all the other parts get
the body’s credit while its marrow does the labor
of replenishing cells and healing the sick
 
being placed in plaster when broken, made
to suffer written rubbish above its wound,
or dropped in the ground, dirt thrown
in its face or burned into bits and pieces
knowing that once it was more than itself
 
being structures that let lives live, being
abandoned, left like fallen bricks.