The Usual Suspects, by Deborah Gorlin

The Usual Suspects

Among the preening aristocrats, 
the resplendent kings and queens, 
the Spanish dancers, the mythic 

enactments, paintings hung from 
the museum’s insular walls, the light
tepid, the moisture in the air like sap 

tapped for syrup, sprayed against
the insects of minutes, here they are 
again, a still life, the familiar duo, 

Mother and Child, suspended locket-like, 
in their eternal protectorate, own force 
field. Their absorption blocks disturbance,

his perennial birth closed as a tomb 
to real life.  A bomb could go off. How 
is it we never see him as a tween, truculent, 

acned, chunky, tee-shirted, hanging 
with his sullen friends? Or her, rumpled 
with trouble, except much later, after. 

Instead, foregrounded upon a staged 
landscape, they only have eyes 
for each other, if they’re even looking. 

The bliss of oblivious love! Divine denial.
Overlapped planets, separate from us, 
an audacity of serenity in the face of, 

we are helpless to copy, once time ruins 
the immaculacy, any wonder we are 
transfixed by this union when all’s possible, 

that your child could be god and by 
extension, you, too. As if these depictions 
represent the one true completion, its peak 

moment, while the rest of a life rambles 
on, dithery in its denouement, filling 
in profiles with definitive features, 
clarifying us, into grown humans, 

faced forward, shedding what happened. 
Our family photos shelved, stashed 
in analog albums, thick as club sandwiches, 

slide from their cellophane 
sleeves, sprung slipshod covers, loosened 
from the spine, straining to contain 

the whole lot, but failing to do so,
sometimes I can’t bear to look at them, 
but other times I can, to find them far more 

interesting in their disturbances and growth, 
our rugged distracted imperfect love.

Deborah Gorlin
 
Deborah Gorlin is the author of two previous books of poems, Bodily Course, White Pine Poetry Press Prize, 1997, and Life of the Garment, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize.  Her new book of poems, Open Fire, Bauhan, was published in Spring, 2023. Recent poems have been published in Plume; On the Seawall; The Ekphrastic Review; Mass Poetry: the Hard Work of Hope; The Common; Rumors, Secrets & Lies; Swwim; and Yetzirah. Her lyric essay, “Jack of All Trades” was a finalist in Calyx magazine’s 2022 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing.  Emerita co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she served for many years as a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review.