Christian Wiman (b. 1966)

Rest Home

At the rest home
rest is
precarious:
limbs and times
spasm and
for a time
vanish:
then the little up-
ruptures re-
settling
as of dust
deep in the unhappened avalanche.

Already not yet
noon
and a line
of squeegied
people
rots and totters,
tilts and mutters
outside the dining
hall. Antbites
of irritation
crawl all over
the attendant's
skin:
will she scream
and fling
them off?
Will the earth
open and God
swallow
this debacle
of animal,
these last
crushed-
cricket
twitches
of existence
testifying
less to survival
than simply
to less?

No.
The doors open
as they always
do, the heart
softens
as it often
does,
and into a dim
because
limp the loved
and the unloved,
some hungry,
some not,
but each
with a place
they know
today, each
of a mind
to stay.

From Once in the West: Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014).