In Beckett’s Waiting Room by Laurie Macfee


 
          found, not erased
 
I am my mother’s room.
An ambulance takes away the pages.
Signs I don’t understand enough to bury
half the words (beginning sounds)
fade—say goodbye—time hedges
for cows in evening silence.

I was not sad. My papers took
little sidestreets, my bicycle
a distant music, languid and watchful.
My mother dressed in details
intervals, insults, the bellowing
of cattle-markets,
blue and gold sediment
the bottom of a splendid sky.

I obtained permission to remain
standing, a dry-bread anguish tottering
and effected. It was not
midnight. It was not.
 
 
Laurie Macfee manages the writing program and grants at Vermont Studio Center. She received her MFA in poetry from Sierra Nevada College in 2015, and was poetry editor and designer of The Sierra Nevada Review. Publications or forthcoming include: Forklift, Ohio; Ninth Letter; Blue Lyra Review; Terminus; Big Bell; Brushfire; and the anthology Change in the American West.