HELPMEET, HANDMAIDEN

Forgive me, but holding down your arms
while someone else pins your legs
and the makeshift nurse probes your wound

while she curses and somewhere bells ring
and the commotion of tools falling
surrounds us, is the best that I can do.

Like you I search for ways
to say what remains
lumpen and inarticulate within me.

Soon, any minute now, we will no longer
have something essential in common
despite our mingled cadre of tears.

This is a border zone. Here is
the line. Now you’ve crossed it.
If you can still hear me, listen.

All this is a dream that keeps coming.
You’re a calf being born.
We reach for you, we knit together

your blood-slick ankles with our hands.
You hear four stomachs gurgling.
Mother, your music—
 

HERE I AM

We continue to
have on our minds
a certain trick
involving the way
light escapes
a darkening room
and slippers
or is it slivers
what did we mean
to say? The day is
cloudless. If we
marked time by
explosions, it would
move slowly and
then fast fast fast.
In the hush
that follows like news
withheld, we speak
in dry tongues drawn
across dry lips,
in phoebe calls
through leaves.
We are flecked
with white puffs
of cloud. We are
laced, a mackerel
sky. In the hush
that follows we
decline to see
what has become,
what each second
is becoming, we see
and say yes, this is
the way things are
now. We see and say
you must wash
we must still wash
I will wash you.
We see fire everywhere
in ribboned light
and pretend it warms us.

I THINK YOU SHOULD HAVE A FEELING ABOUT ME

The day does not resemble us,
it is not like any of our other days
together. Clouds crisp the atmosphere,
they create a world below
and the illusion that anything
above is beyond our concern.
We build rooms for ourselves
out of other people’s knick-knacks—
cast-offs, runaways—we gather them
from all directions, selecting as we go,
as they come, not any, but anything.
You want me to be crueler,
but look, I am very cruel.
I am willing to leave you here
with all this junk piling up
around you, I’m just waiting
for my opening, I’m just waiting
to be asked. Obviously the fake
wisteria is stupid; its lavender tells us
nothing. The cat claw pillow,
though, the pink lampshade
of cell phone covers, they’ve seen
a thing or two of desperation.
The crystal ball only hangs the world
upside down—miniature apartment
buildings, miniature sidewalks
and trees standing on their heads.
Clearly, it was wrong to ignore you.
I do care, very much,
what your thoughts are on me.
Out of being invisible, you’ve stepped
into right in front of my face
and I can’t see around you.
I have a feeling that you might be
a good kind of pain, like being
something delicate caught in a vise
grip. I arrived in one piece
and I’ll leave pleasantly shattered,
picking through the shards of myself—
real pieces no longer part of a whole.
There are photographs of generations
on the walls meant to remind me,
but they just float by like friends
I don’t see much anymore.
They don’t tell me who I am,
they don’t tell me where to be,
but Hello, Grandfather, Hello,
aunts and uncles. I hope
it’s not cold where you are.
In these pictures you’re always
kissing to keep warm.