Two Poems

by Flannery White


Rush

She lies still,
each hand
palm up. The nearby freeway's rush
sounds like the surf. Maybe it is
too dark to see the cracks in the ceiling,
but it is not too dark to feel them, etched on each tense

muscle, like her desperation to live in the present tense,
to do more in her life than be still.
I am too young, she thinks, to stare at a ceiling
this way. She lifts a hand
to study it and finds it foreign in the dark. It is
the wrong color in the intermittent rush

of headlights. Her heart thumps. She wants to rush.
That is what present tense
means to her: it is
a challenge, the reason she hates being still--
she is terrified to risk never meeting it. Her hand
curls and she aims for the ceiling

but it falls, while the ceiling,
immobile, remains unharmed. She remembers, when she was nine, the rush
of grabbing an electric fence with her whole hand.
She knows she went tense,
knows her teeth clenched, but all she remembers is flying. She still
wants to grab electric fences whenever she sees them. She now realizes this is

the origin of her fondness for pastures. She is
afraid she will be caught under this cracked ceiling
her whole life. Still
forever, never to fly, never to feel that rush
again. She is afraid of the past tense,
can feel it closing in. She refuses to believe this the hand

life will deal her. She studies her pale hand
again, recognizes it this time. She knows who she is.
She is the lepidopteron that flies when others would be pinned, tense
with rigor mortis. Neither that glass ceiling
nor any other could ever hold her. The certainty is a rush
of euphoria quickly gone. She is still

lying under that cracked ceiling. She flexes her tense hand: it unfurls
like a wing. She grows still as she is lulled to sleep
by the oceanic rush of lights across her ceiling.


Advice from my Grandmother

“A person can live too long,” she tells me.

“Don’t get old--
                        whatever you do, dear heart, don’t get old.”

“I hope I’ll be old!” I say. Smile.
                        I watch her unbalanced walk and think: I’ll try.

This group home is not her home.
A person can live too long.

Don’t be ridiculous, her sons and daughters tell her.
You aren’t a burden. We love you. You aren’t a burden.
            They mean it,
                     even as they give up weekends to remember things for her
                           to wash her clothes             to check her meds
                                                 to pay her bills               to clean her sheets
              They love her.
But she has lived too long and so she knows:
                       a burden you love is still heavy.

I tell her
               “Missing you would be a burden, too.”
She pats my hand and calls me kind
but in two minutes she has forgotten and here I am next to her
           missing her anyway.


I can’t stay forever.
I hate to have her thinking well of me
    when I am leaving her here
waiting with equal anticipation on a relative or Death
                                                                                      whoever gets there first.

A person can live too long,
                              she tells me.
            Don’t get old.