Potscrubber Lullabies
1.
The Potscrubber completes a cycle
so vigorous the knives were rattling,
and pauses, waking Evan Michael,
who finds all silences unsettling.
There’s no resemblance. It’s
too early.
Everything is still so round.
But we’ve occurred to him as surely
as silence has occurred to sound,
and when he’s finished sharpening
into himself, and when we’ve blurred,
we’re going to go on happening
in silence like he’s never heard.
2.
I wore him like a broken arm
all summer, slung
from my right shoulder in a paisley hammock
so deep the sides closed over him.
When I walked he swung, and slept,
lulled by the time his body kept
against my stomach.
When I stopped I had to sing.
Eric McHenry is a freelance journalist who has written for the New York Times Book Review,
the Boston Globe, and Slate. His poems have appeared
recently in Northwest
Review, The New Republic, and Literary Imagination.
