At the End of Each Sentence by Jeff Hardin

Because I thought it was raining, I leaned back
into a deeper part of myself. Womb-like, safe.
The house was sturdy, would survive high winds,
though none were on the radar. Why did I think
it was raining? It wasn’t. It hadn’t rained in days.
I must have drawn some sound around me,
given it a narrative, lived its themes, followed
its streetlights down a once familiar sidewalk.
The mind conceives a world it needs to know.
Outside one window: six crepe myrtle trees,
the corner of a porch, two sycamores rising
above a ditch line’s runoff and, farther past
the hills, a river’s course like a splayed rope.
Outside another window: a brush pile years old,
a hundred acre wood unfit for development.
Whether or not the windows really exist, they
exist because the mind wants them to. A bus
arrives. Everything turns on who gets on, who
gets off, whether last year or five decades ago.
This town. That town. A car approaching or not.
Maybe the house never came on the market,
the one in which three boys would have played
in the basement. Is that why two boys remain?
Wrong time, wrong street, wrong words to
a story that should have never come to be. At
the end of each sentence so many possibilities
crowd in. A foot slides on a rock. A silence
allows one sound, and then every other bird
begins. Daffodils fan out from chimney stones
where a house once stood. An owl glides past.
In someone’s version an angel never visits
Mary. In someone’s version, the Rapture has
already happened. On one horizon, nothing
separates us from the age to come. On another,
Auschwitz looks like child’s play. What theme
contains them all? How sturdy is any construction?
The next thing will be the next thing whether
anyone believes or expects it, whether one
voice or a million are lifted in prayer or protest.
Maybe signs and wonders are a kind of antimatter,
one particle remaining when all the others have
been annihilated. Maybe thoughts are positrons
emitted toward others. Who receives them?
Just before or just after is the life that is given
and not another. The rain falls. Then it doesn’t.
Then a story begins that contains its own end.

Jeff Hardin is the author of six collections of poetry: Fall Sanctuary (Nicholas Roerich Prize); Notes for a Praise Book (Jacar Press Book Award); Restoring the Narrative (Donald Justice Prize); Small Revolution; No Other Kind of World (X. J. Kennedy Prize), and A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being. The New Republic, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, North American Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Hotel Amerika, and Southern Poetry Review have published his poems. He teaches at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, TN.