Sean Lause

An elderly Jewish man confronting Alzheimer’s



I grow weary of numbers
tumbling to a shimmering dust.

There is no getting back
except through forgetting.
I have remembered too long
and too much, now I long
to touch the silence
between drops of rain.

Sunlight dances on my eyelids,
the moon escapes the net of faces,
the universe folds
like a sleeping flower,
and all is altered
by the sound of a fly
spinning circles in a glass.

Let the mind return
to rivers
seeking arterial destinations.
I will hide my face
in the soonest wind.

Touch me, touch me,
Rabbi Akiva…
Show me the hiding place
where no one is alone.





The wolf as original dreamer


The earth would burst incandescent
they said, but I was prepared
with an army of dreams and magic
and each night a thousand stars
descended from the ceiling like cobalt spiders
to weave my bed of innocence.

The fall came when my father placed a book
of Peter and the Wolf before the mirror.
I could not stop watching the wolf,
its lava eyes spilling rage and violation,
teeth swirling in a snarl of white death,
its feet clawing for the earth to return.

Above, Peter clung to the tree branch
faceless, like all sadists,
tightening his noose over its tail
to suspend it through eternity,
and to make the torture exquisite,
he made music from its misery.

Tonight, alone in bed,
my wife dying, son grown and gone,
the wolf leaps from a shadow in my dream,
folds itself around me, shredded tail bleeding.
I sing gently to it,
sharing the hunger still hovering in the air.

Sean Lause lives with his son,
Christopher, in Bluffton, Ohio.  Sean
teaches courses in Shakespeare,
Literature and
the Holocaust, Composition and Speech
at Rhodes State College in Lima, Ohio.  
Sean has published in The Mid-American
Review, Poetry International, The
Minnesota Review, Epicenter, The
King's English, European Judaism, The
Iconoclast,
The Blue Collar Review, Arsenic
Lobster and Frog Pond.