Paul Martin Eternity

Paul Martin

Eternity

Trying to explain it to us twelve-year-olds, the young nun told us to picture a beach on the Jersey shore where someone, once a year, came and took away a single grain of sand. The time it would take, she said, to empty the beach, to make it disappear, would not amount to even one second in eternity, which caused me, for a moment, to stop exchanging rubber faces with crazy Joey Malesky and consider the immensity of the eternal, and who that someone was who took away the beach grain by grain, and what age he’d have to live to, and where and why he took the sand, each of which, in succession, I asked the nun whose jaw, I could see, tighten, whose eyes fixedsilentlyon me for what felt like a very long time, an eternity, it seemed.

The Absence

Such stillness in the house this winter night I remember an aged teacher calling roll.

After “here” and “here” and "here” the boy’s name followed by silence,

the teacher raising her eyes above her glasses toward the vacant desk

where, for a moment, she stared, then resumed the names, softer and more uncertain.