The Thing That Looked Like Anger

I broke a chair on a Thursday evening in the spring,
Not the kind of dramatic furniture-throwing — just a thing
That gave way when I put my fist through the seat because
The alternative was putting my fist through a wall, and the cause
Of restraint in that direction was purely structural:
The wall is shared, the landlord is factual.
I sat on the kitchen floor with the broken chair
and looked at it,
And I thought: this is the grief doing what it does with the lit
Fuse of frustration and the insufficient outlet
Of the day-to-day — it finds the crack, it sets the bullet
Of three months of compressed weight into a piece of furniture,
And the furniture takes it because the furniture’s inferior
To everything else available and can be replaced.
The thing that looked like anger was the grief in a hard hat,
The grief doing the construction work, the grief flat
And forward and uncouth and unsuitable for company —
Not the grief that people want to witness, not the harmony
Of the formal mourning with its designated containers,
The anger-grief that scares the visitors, that drainers
The sympathy of the audience, the grief that needs a chair.
The chair’s in the dumpster and the fist is wrapped,
And I sat with the grief counselor Thursday and unwrapped
Enough of it to understand where the chair came from —
The third month of performing fine, the income
Of all the grief I’d been depressing below the acceptable surface
Into a pressure system with no adequate purpose
Other than eventually expressing itself through something.
Which I knew, which I’d been told, which the Wednesday circle
Addressed at length — and knowing and the actual circus
Of the grief-anger are not the same thing apparently,
And that’s fine, that’s just being a person coherently.