Selah

I said nothing at the time, and still
do not want to speak of it. Selah.

Is this cowardice, distaste? Or is it
disbelief? I can’t believe he cheated

during the game. Was he high?
Had he smoked a little before he came?

To bear the long afternoon, the same
tendencies and stories and patterns,

the long pauses as my father weighed
his choices, considered his outcomes,

his strategies, his justifications.
Was my husband a little high, to relax,

to bear up under the same old same old
of helping me tend my parents,

play the game they like, that exercises
my mother’s brain synapses

as her memory goes?
If my father

had done it, lifted the card in the hole
to look at it, obviously, boldly,

and twice, I’d have called him on it,
loudly, risen from my chair,

righteous and appalled. But I just stared
at my husband, who seemed unaware

of his transgression, and thus not wicked
nor ashamed, as if this were a house rule,

one card facing down that you could lift
and look at. Selah. So much

I don’t understand. Even the word “selah.”
No one knows for sure what it means:

musical pause, musical instruction?
I hear it as a word like “alas” with a sigh in it.

Is it a small pause of the heart
or mind, a chance to reflect on what is good

even as you gaze at what is bad, or hard,
or incomprehensible…in silence?

— Babs