ANOTHER ANNIVERSARY
Stephen Ruffus
It begins in a car speeding across
the plains in the summer heat
until the sun rests along the horizon.
He waits to be born on an early morning,
the nickel of the moon tacked low in the sky.
On an empty street
I see his shadow barely lit
walking slowly toward me from a long distance.
He is in the hallway in the place
where I once lived.
On one end he is the man he was.
On the other is the child who favored
dreams to bedtime stories I would read him,
whose dreams now form the book
written in words ever trespassing
across the shifting landscape of my sleep.
It is the second anniversary of my son's death, and I am dreaming of him as both a child and an adult simultaneously. The images in the poem, particularly the one in which I see him in the hallway of the apartment where I grew up, are meant to reflect my ongoing struggle with his loss and my understanding of who he was.
STEPHEN RUFFUS is the author of a chapbook, In Lieu Of (Elk Press, 2024) His work has appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, 3rd Wednesday, the American Journal of Poetry, The Shore, Poetica Review, JMWW, Emerge Literary Journal, and Stone Poetry Quarterly, among others. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, his work also received two awards in the Utah Original Writing Competition and was a finalist for the Concrete Wolf Louis Poetry Book Award. Stephen was a founding poetry editor of Quarterly West. Originally from NYC, he still considers himself a New Yorker in many respects and currently lives in Salt Lake City with his wife.