Anniversary

by Kelle Groom

When the obsession was lifted,
I felt the sun on my face as if

I were driving a convertible,
as if light had a hand and

a cloak or arm around my shoulders,
falling on me in traffic when I was sunk

in the upholstery, the unchanging red
light, and I’d look up, expecting to see

someone. When I’d sit on a bench
or walk across a parking lot, heaviness

fell off like carburetors, mufflers,
as if I’d been magnetic and called

these things to me, as if obsession
had an auto parts store and sadness

bought a radiator hissing by my side.
Once, a man from England offered

to cleanse my aura. I knew he wasn’t
completely human, like the angels

who were men, so I lay down on
a table like an ironing board, flat

as the table they slid the German girl
on as if she were a loaf of bread

into the oven that was a guillotine—
the actress said it’s nothing

to imagine herself dying here
because it’s all inside her head,

nothing compared to the hundreds
or the thousands who lay locked

inside the wooden block, facing
a metal basket for the head,

but the actress did lie down where all
that fear had gathered and those auras

of goodbye. I slept for hours that felt
like minutes, the Englishman’s face

hazy, rainy behind glass,
and he swept away the dark

clutter that clung to me like bats.
When I woke it was night,

and outside, I walked by a mailbox
that seemed full of messages for me.

Even now when I am on the bridge
crossing the river, birds

write something in the sky,
and at the high point of the road,

the ocean draws a blue line
that I’m driving toward.

 

Kelle Groom’s poetry collections are Underwater City (University Press of Florida, 2004) and Luckily, a Florida Book Award winner (Anhinga Press, 2006). Her poems have appeared in DoubleTake, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Witness. She is communications manager and grants administrator for Atlantic Center for the Arts, an artists-in-residence facility in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. (6/2007)