He lay among
the background hums of deep night
on this more inhabited world,
anonymous machines vaguely at large,
gears and wheels and rotors
spinning in service of the sleeping
and the sleepless,
the half-life of jet lag
yawning before him,
with days to go before he’d be
accustomed again
and ready for the routines
of this other place,
his feet willing enough,
notwithstanding
the Greek chorus
of dead French philosophers
he kept squeezed
into silence
on an untended shelf.
Bob Brussack is oldish and therefore burdened with the usual accumulation of reasons to grieve. He lived in Manhattan first, then Long Island, then in the southern reaches of the ancient foothills of the Appalachians, and mostly after that in Athens, Georgia, teaching law. Now he divides his time between Athens and a sea town near the coast of the Celtic Sea.