Robert Estes
Summer 2025 | Poetry
Three Poems
Age of Wonder
I feel kind of funny
I wonder if people feel funny
when they’re just about to die
I wonder if this is the kind
of funny they feel if they do
End of My Cousin’s First Visit in Years
I can remember when he
was a newborn and I was five.
We love you!
Why not I, instead of we?
We is true, but mainly
I’m still a bit shy of I.
He didn’t respond,
but he was getting into his Lyft
and sometimes
misses things at first
despite his hearing aids.
Casket Fillers
They do their best to render a
semblance of the living person
with those pathetic funereal
images—fit for reclining
figures in a wax museum;
but their best just makes me shake my
head. No, that is not the one I
loved at all. That’s not an object
worthy of the name of Nature
nor of Art; good to get it out
of everybody’s sight, bury
deep the lie, fasten on the truth
again in babies’ gazing eyes.
Robert Estes, who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, got his Physics PhD from UC Berkeley and had some interesting experiences using physics, notably on a couple of US-Italian Space Shuttle missions. Since then, 50-odd of his poems have appeared in literary journals, including Gargoyle, The Moth, Anacapa Review, Cola Literary Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Masque & Spectacle, the museum of americana, Constellations, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Sierra Nevada Review.