Knowing
Leland Seese
“So Jacob served seven years for Rachel,
and they seemed to him but a few days,
because of the love he had for her” (Genesis 29:20).
I am ticking steady as a timepiece. Our patience is astonishing to me.
Up at five each morning, head-start on the August heat,
scraping, sanding, climbing up and down a ladder, priming, painting
Mom’s house Cape Cod blue. Quiver in her smile as she tells me,
This is such a consolation, worth the wait for all those years.
Dad had overruled her every time she asked, said no blue houses
in our neighborhood. Since he ran off with his secretary,
he no longer has a say.
Three o’clock, wash brushes, take a shower, shave.
Devour two ham sandwiches Mom made before she left for work.
Bus downtown, sweep the carpet in the lobby, take tickets,
guide aged patrons to their seats. Tedious production, old-fashioned
melodrama, actors clacking out their lines like ticker tape.
You are twenty. I am not quite twenty-two. And we are waiting
for the end of August, to know what we already know. Neither of us
able to explain how time becomes a thing that lies down in the sun
and stretches, like a cat gone slack and satisfied.
Or like the way I once stood still within the old and always cold
abandoned rail tunnel at the summit of the pass, turned off my flashlight,
felt the blackness warm as an embrace, time wandered off its tracks.
You phone me at the theater. Time leaps to its feet, defying August heat,
flinging me past sixteen hours’ toil. I dash to catch a crosstown bus,
sprint to make the transfer to another.
And there you are, cool as midnight, standing on the sidewalk
by the movie house where you sell popcorn, Cokes, and candy bars.
Red polyester uniform, black epaulettes. And now I know how Jacob
waited seven years for Rachel, and when at last he kissed her
why he wept aloud.
Leland Seese's poems appear in RHINO, The Stonecoast Review, The Chestnut Review, Rust & Moth, and many other journals. His debut chapbook, "Wherever This All Ends", was released in 2020 (Kelsay Books). He lives in Seattle with his wife, their six grown children nearby.