Look

by Sandy Solomon

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There where the sleeve flaps,                                               
​                                                   a stump. War loss,
perhaps,
                or evidence of a slip at work,
the mechanic’s nightmare.
                                              But what draws me first
is not the stump, not his hearing aid,
but the way,
                       as they stand by the lift
                                                           waiting to rise,
his wife reaches
                              the side of her whole hand,
gnarled as a tree root open to sky, 
to stroke his cheek
                                   and smooth traces of his hair,
and the look they exchange— 
                                                   neither love nor desire,
but a sign of long knowledge
                                                    and both somehow. 

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Sandy Solomon’s book, Pears, Lake, Sun, which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, was published simultaneously in the UK by Peterloo Poets. Her work has appeared in various magazines and journals in the US and the UK, including, in the last few years, The New Yorker, Plume, Scientific American, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, and Vox Populi. Two of her poems were published in A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, 1925-2025. She divides her time between Nashville (she taught in Vanderbilt’s Creative Writing Program) and Suffolk, England.

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