The Present Tense

by Mike Smith

The little phones his children keep charged
in their pockets are a marvel, their invention
more miracle than the devices the heroes use
against the noisy monsters in the shows
his addled daughter watches day and night.
Their phones might even help him with his next large task,
but he refuses to use one. His task: To find
his wife and bring her back home. Two years now,
she’s been dead, but that is no matter. She comes
to him in the night to remind him of her absence
and each morning he wakes, renewed with purpose.
His family, even his strange daughter, do their best
to relieve him of his task. They are clever.
They point out the blue urn he himself chose
and remind him it is filled with her ashes, which
he does not dispute. The more time passes,
the cleverer they get. They frame tributes to her
and hang them throughout the house, hoping
to convince him that she is truly gone. But he
knows she is gone. That is, in fact, why the task
is so difficult, so worthy of his attempts.
They now tell him, when he chooses to bring it up,
that he has already brought her back, that she
is there with him as they speak, and they point
to the urn or to their hearts. He appears befuddled,
which, he confesses, isn’t a stretch these days,
and he moves to other subjects, allowing
a part of himself to enjoy their company, the classic
they put on for him each night at eight. But the part
of his brain that still holds together, the part
that tells him he can still do things as he once did,
do anything, do the impossible, like the heroes
of the movies he grew up with and now revisit
every night, works on a way to find and lead her back
to the bed they have shared for seventy years.

He saw Captain Blood when he was ten. At thirteen,
The Adventures of Robin Hood. Footsteps in the Dark
came out the year he met Emily, his fiancé. But then
he was drafted and sent to North Africa. Gentleman Jim
opened the night he met Severine, who was anything
but severe, at a warehouse outside Oran, which is where
he was stationed after Casablanca (seventeen, never
one of his favorites), which housed the supplies that stocked
the hospitals trailing the lines. San Antonio, two weeks
before he turned twenty-one, released
almost four months after the end of the war
when he was still in Africa and so full of dread
at having to part from Severine that he practiced
a speech in the mirror while he shaved but then shipped out
on a day she didn’t show and so never
had to say to her: farewell, my love, goodbye.

Mike Smith has published seven books of poetry, creative nonfiction and literature in translation, the latest of which appeared in 2018. In 2024, he received a literary fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission for the promise of new work. Recent work has appeared in Blue Unicorn and Interim. He lives with his family in the Mississippi Delta.