Disappearing Act
We all disappear
at one point or other.
I do not like this final game
of hide and seek;
this becoming ‘late’ is
disconcerting, unsettlliing,
and just rude.
It is not about the dying
or the dead:
it is about the disappearing.
One’s presence, the presence
of another is absent, AWOL, gone
—yet the allowed space
is still there, still palpable,
still realized in the midst;
in the mind
rattling around in the attic’s
detritus dropping books,
banging head on old swag lamps,
tramping around trying to
reconnect with that
contented familiar position
of settled rest.
On the landing
shadowing face moving;
always moving just
one eye
almost looking back
at what was, what is
like a disquieted
nickelodeon world
seeing color.
Becoming the half
seen half of flickering
shape in the partial light
of a starlit night
in a house of the living
who’s lives never
sat at table and stared
across sun lit eyes.
Amorphous grays of dusk
randomly slip through the
distant gaps in the rising
landscape out past
where eyes do not focus
creating waves
of grays and
sliding figures
passing ever just
outside the creeping mist.
East Lansing
September 17, 2015
East Lansing Series
@2015 Disappearing Act — Joseph Yarbrough
Reproduction prohibited without written permission
We all disappear
at one point or other.
I do not like this final game
of hide and seek;
this becoming ‘late’ is
disconcerting, unsettlliing,
and just rude.
It is not about the dying
or the dead:
it is about the disappearing.
One’s presence, the presence
of another is absent, AWOL, gone
—yet the allowed space
is still there, still palpable,
still realized in the midst;
in the mind
rattling around in the attic’s
detritus dropping books,
banging head on old swag lamps,
tramping around trying to
reconnect with that
contented familiar position
of settled rest.
On the landing
shadowing face moving;
always moving just
one eye
almost looking back
at what was, what is
like a disquieted
nickelodeon world
seeing color.
Becoming the half
seen half of flickering
shape in the partial light
of a starlit night
in a house of the living
who’s lives never
sat at table and stared
across sun lit eyes.
Amorphous grays of dusk
randomly slip through the
distant gaps in the rising
landscape out past
where eyes do not focus
creating waves
of grays and
sliding figures
passing ever just
outside the creeping mist.
East Lansing
September 17, 2015
East Lansing Series
@2015 Disappearing Act — Joseph Yarbrough
Reproduction prohibited without written permission