What Rough Beast | Covid-19 Edition | 06 11 20 | Denver Butson

Denver Butson
Weariness

even the peonies are weary
they drop their heads
on fence railings

they hang their heads
down along their stems

the air is so heavy
with what we have
asked it to carry

with the burdens
of ourselves
we have given it
to hold

yesterday I saw a man
who looked like
he could belong
to a distant century
except for his face mask
and plastic bag
stop and pull peonies
out of that bag
and lay them on the bumper
of a refrigerated corpse truck
humming behind a funeral home
and look up at the sky
above the corpse truck
with dignity and ceremony

he turned
looked right at me
and then seemed
to go back to
disintegrating
into weary dust
before my eyes

every evening
at approximately 7:02
when the applause
on our street
and apparently every other street
in the city ends

a little boy
a few doors up
whose name is Samson
tries to have the last word
with me

after all the cheering
and clapping
and pot banging stops
he looks at me
across the stoops
between us
and bangs his pot
decisively

and I look right at him
and bang my popcorn can lid
with just as much meaning

and then he bangs twice
and I bang twice
and then three and three

and then with great fanfare
he lifts his spoon
one last time
and I try to match
his strike
so that together
we make one last
mighty sound

it’s as if we are
two dueling drummers
who have decided
to work together
and not against
one another

or just two people
who won’t drop our heads

who refuse to simply go back
into the silence

without doing all we can
not to be weary

—Submitted on 06/11/2020

Denver Butson is the author of five books of poetry, including most recently In Which We All Kiss Something Secretly (Court Tree Collective, 2019), a collaboration with visual artist Maria Mercedes Martinez. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Ontario Review, Field, Zyzzyva, Tin House, and other journals, as well is in several anthologies. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.