Robbie Gamble: “Abundance”
ABUNDANCE
Soaks of rain banding through the day
again, and my father recently told me
his mother ended her life by refusing
liquids anymore, a stubborn act of will
to supersede some treatable abdominal
cancer, because she was tired, and she
missed her husband dead seventeen years.
I’ve walked in the desert, I know
what a terrible clench thirst can be
and I can’t imagine welcoming it in
as friend, co-conspirator, executioner;
how could she commit to such deprivation
until her throat dried, her kidneys shut down,
and she just drifted, desiccated, away?
My corner of the country suffers excess
rain right now, floods of abundance
as erosive as too much fire, or will,
or indifference, or grief. Last time I saw
her, she stared up right through the ceiling
with wide blue eyes, croaking, “I’m so proud
of all my grandchildren,” and I’m not sure
if she really knew who I was just then,
not me, Robbie, first son of her middle son
Walter, but rather some abstract embodiment
of descendent from that frenetic cohort
that splashed and paddled the family beach
in Maine, now floating farther and farther
from her indominable parched shoreline.
Robbie Gamble is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in RHINO, Salamander, The Sun, Whale Road Review, and Worcester Review. He is the poetry editor for Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices.