Order this writing in the book Sunlight in the Sanctuary (the 2015 poetry, flash fiction, prose & artwork anthology)		get this poem collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

enjoy this writing from Paul Bellerive in the free 2019 chapbook: Tales Told to Friends (click on the front cover image or the title text to download the free PDF file)				You can also order this as a 2019 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the book cover to order Tales Told to Friends as a book at any time!

Order this writing that appears in the one-of-a-kind anthology The Flickering Light the Down in the Dirt Jan.-June 2019 issues & chapbooks collection book (learn about this book, and order from Amazon online)		get the 366 page Jan.-June 2019 Down in the Dirt issue & chapbooks 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

The Loft, Bobby, and Those Sad, Wise Eyes

Paul Bellerive

Loft with ceiling so low I cannot stand,
a hand-printed poster decrying war
nailed to the studs years ago by a boy
whose roiled soul was too kind and gentle
to be the soldier his father had been,
to defend what he never understood.
Rough board floor, joists forming upside-down Vs,
tops of pine trees visible from louvers,
the only connection to the outside,
to the wider world three stories below.

It is the only place I can afford,
the room and board slightly less than the pay
I receive for cleaning the gross restrooms
where dank plumes of steam rise from rank toilets
installed in the days of Mayor Wainright
when sidewalk light came from kerosene lamps.
When I enter, the tourists shrink aside,
give me a wide berth as if I might be
one of the urine-stained, homeless wrecks
who beckons to them as they hurry past.

* * *

It was not always so.

The boy who first lived in the loft and I
met at recess at Smith Elementary –
a punch, a chipped tooth, and we were friends
for all the years, friends, classmates, and teammates;
teenage summers when we could find no work
we waded through brush and climbed the steel fence,
swung carefully over the barbed wire
landed, straightened, and walked like conquerors
past the timid, picknicking families
to the dense heart of the Animal Park.

Wonders from around the world greeted us:
Siberian tigers huge and silent
patrolling a steep, rocky hillside range;
a fierce grizzly from Kodiak Island
standing like a giant on great hind legs,
pythons as large as imagination
wrapped in immense coils around bare branches,
and most wonderful of all the wonders
Colossus, a shy mountain gorilla,
a Professor, an Ethicist supreme.

Five or six hundred pounds, a silverback
motionless beside a hanging tire,
an awesome presence protected from us
by twelve-foot-high glass walls and a glass ceiling,
and most entrancing of all his wide eyes,
at once sad, intelligent, gentle, wise,
eyes that spoke of mountains shrouded in mist,
of words like freedom made suddenly clear,
of right and wrong, the sanctity of life,
of crimes for which we are responsible.

I left the lessons in those eyes behind,
but Bobby was a far better student.
“Coward! Coward! My own son a traitor!”
Bobby heard the words over and over,
heard them when he grew hair to his shoulders,
when he declared himself a pacifist,
heard them when he refused to be drafted,
heard them when his red-faced, enraged father
could endure the sight of him no longer,
and he retreated to the attic loft.

Resting, awaiting approaching darkness
dug in on a Central Highlands mountain,
eating ham and lima beans from a can,
staring at the letter’s return address,
familiar but unreal, like a strange dream,
Bobby committed suicide last week,
the absurd letters in his mother’s hand,
no note, nothing, dead in the attic loft,
But I was sure you would want to know.
Another casualty of a bad war.

* * *

Home, in a place that is no longer home,
always alone, ignored and forgotten
by all who want to avoid reminders
of a time too divisive, too bitter,
too difficult to grasp, to understand;
feeling abandoned, walking littered streets,
seeing nothing in the eyes around me,
huddled beneath overhangs in the snow
shivering with cold, with fear, with outrage;
the sad, sage, kind eyes staring through the haze.

So many years ago, so many years,
tears for Bobby only recently shed,
tears only recently able to flow
only now able to show some feeling,
to admit the wisdom in those sad eyes;
the poster still hangs, still decries all wars,
the loft is calm, quiet, a bit forlorn
now that Bobby’s mom is in the home
I visit each week, deliver the rent,
invent stories that keep Bobby alive.

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