Suddenly I have one eyebrow gone
significantly grayer than the other,
the left almost white while the right
remains a toasty golden brown.
A kind-of heterochromia, I guess.
Like a cat with one gold eye, one blue.
A scale out of balance. A precarious flicker
of ash. A seesaw upon which
an old man sits, his great weight holding
his colorful young companion aloft.
As I get older, around the office
I begin to be mistaken by the newer
employees for someone of importance,
someone of influence.
A seasoned decision maker.
Wisdom in nice pants.
Call it a career, but I’ve just
had a job for an awfully long time.
What they can’t see is I have risen
as high as I will rise, like a firework
whose powder has burned away,
rings of smoke wafting into the hills
like the cogs of an obsolete machine.
That makes me the phoenix in descent,
though the pressure to fly persists.
My boss projects upon a waving white flag
the picture of a breadwinner, a hero in triumph
after an overtime shift, a birthday party missed
for a business trip, a marriage dulled by absence.
He believes himself a firefighter coaxing open
a hydrant valve to cool neighborhood kids
on a hot street corner. Water under pressure
forces a leak, a jet, a shockwave that knocks
his employees down, scuds us like dead leaves
down the gutter and into the sewer.
Having flown only so high, I wheel
far from the deforming rays of the sun
and the fallacy that I am what I do for money.
Over the rooftop of my life, I fly low,
swooping like a multicolored bird through
the yellowing elms, winging past maples
reddening like fire, encircling
browning birches in song, alighting upon
the wintering firs, half their limbs
whitened with snow.
–
An MFA student in the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University, Eric Lochridge (he/him) is the author of My Breath Floats Away From Me (FutureCycle Press, 2022) and three chapbooks. His poems have appeared in DIAGRAM, Okay Donkey, Moist, and Anti-Heroin Chic.