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Gary Fincke: The Double Negatives of the Living
After the pastor spoke well,
After he opened our route
With syntax and grammar
Correct as his manner,
I could follow my mother
To her grave and lapse into
The double negatives
Of the living. I could talk
Two hours past midnight with
My father in the steelworker
Idiom of his city, hearing
The fried mush of morning,
The white Sunday silence,
The many tongues of the cross
Speaking dialect stories
Of the holy mill. I could catch
His punctuation by breath born
In the thick ash of evening,
Overhear the end stops in
His coughs, the accidental case
For the thrift store’s stock,
The body’s swift tumors;
The chance of modifiers
For the factory uncles,
The fat, baking aunts,
The grandmothers in the pews
Of their dead husbands
Or rocking on porches
Flush with the brutal streets.
And finally the commas for
Steel, rivers, bridges, bars.
And Christ, the Expletive,
And all of the language
Of the land that we leave
And return to, reopening
The earth and stammering
Like the past’s twin-speech,
What we know by repeating,
What runs on without us.
Copyright 2021 Gary Fincke. Previously published in Poetry and in The Double Negatives of the Living, Zoland Books.
Gary Fincke has won numerous awards for his writing, including the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry Magazine. He lives in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania.
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