Life on Floor One
Abdul is in the lobby vacuuming the fifty dollar
entrance way carpet. It is what he does.
I hear him just the other side of a prewar door
pretending to separate elements.
He wears the high peak hat the management company
gave him and why not he says.
Before him, Maher was not asked to vacuum, instead
he exuded his nearly silent intelligence
into the lobby, an environmental scientist from Yemen
whose wife, a doctor, was not allowed
to enter the country. I think they are now together
in Mumbai, I don’t know, we have lost touch.
These are the things that are done. Done though
nothing praise God is ever completed.
My grandfathers restitched or stitched whatever
you wanted, they knew what you wanted
before you even thought it, even though this only scratches
the depth and breath of the surface let us say amen
and perhaps remember. This is how it is done. Show up,
put one’s finger in the dike of every man’s entropy.
Hold back the tides until no one remembers. This is how it is done.
-Original publication Adirondack Review, 2019