| Wellwood by Barry Seiler | ||
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This is what they have chosen, this little village of the departed cousins and countrymen not so far out on the Island where my mother dreamed of retirement— a woman of property, with a stole, her children schooled and thriving, secure in the American elsewhere— where the Rosenbergs rest in peace, whom I mistook for my parents, hiding myself beneath the kitchen table, a little spy among the limbs. I've been twice to gather stones to place on their headstones as signs that the living recall the departed. By now they must be overgrown with weeds and wildflowers, the odd seeds exiled by migrating birds. I should return and perform a son's duty. I've studied the route: from Penn to Pinelawn Station, and a quick cab ride to the cemetery. The driver will wait as I tend to my business: say the words, arrange the stones, tidy up. There is glamour in the waiting cab. There is glamour in the ticking meter, an orphan's glamour, to count out for all to hear and peel off the bills, to say, casually, to the indifferent driver the way the big shots do, Keep the change.
BARRY SEILER, a native of the Bronx, teaches at Rutgers University, Newark. He has a B.A. in English from Queens College in New York and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of California at Irvine. He has published two previous books in the Akron Series in Poetry, The Waters of Forgetting and Black Leaf. "Wellwood" is taken from his new collection, Frozen Falls (University of Akron Press)
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