This was the winter mother told time by my heart
ticking like a frayed fan belt in my chest.
This was the fifties & we were living on nothing
& what of her, the black girl, my own black nurse,
what of her who arrived on Greyhound in the heart
of so dramatic a storm it froze the sleeves at her wrists
& each nostril was rimed with white like salt on a glass,
what of her who came up the dark stair on the limp of her
own bad ticker, weary, arrogant, thin, her suitcase noosed
That was not the summer of aspic
and cold veal. It was so hot
the car seat stung my thighs
and the rearview mirror swam
with mirage. In the back seat
the leather grip was noosed by twine.
We were not poor but we had
the troubles of the poor.
She who had been that soft snore
beside the Nytol, open-mouthed,
was gone, somewhere, somewhere
there was a bay, there was a boat,
I forgot to tell you it's almost time to go.
The sun has distilled its particular worn essence
And the glittering trout is flipped on the bow.
A man asks me what time it is. I don't know.
I have emptied my purse and wept in the presence
Of onlookers. I forgot to remember to go
Before eleven, when the steely arrow
Shot swimming to its underneath, tense
As a stream of salmon in reverse below
on the ground can spook a horse who won’ t flinch when faced
with a backhoe or a pack of Harleys. I call it “horse
ophthalmology,” because it is a different kind of system —
not celestial, necessarily, but vision in which the small,
the wispy, the lightly lifted or stirring threads of existence
excite more fear than louder and larger bodies do. It’ s Matthew
who said that the light of the body is the eye, and that if
the eye is healthy the whole body will be full of light. Maybe
She always liked to blow the candles out. Fact:
there’ s only so much you can do with friction
and an intentional hand before the hand burns.
The sound that scissors make in a child’ s hand
while crunching construction paper aches when
she grows older. Even popcorn ceilings lose that style,
that feeling of a cereal freshly drowned in milk.
Ah, the white beneath things. And the black below that.
We come down from bunk beds. We come down from
the funky reds and yellows of the spring’ s summer tanager
& sea swell, hiss ofincomprehensible flat: distance: blue long-fingered ocean and its
nothing else: nothing in the above visible except
water: water and
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study. These are the poems
of a man who would murder his mother to claim
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
Intractable between them grows
a garden of barbed wire and roses.
Burning briars like flames devour
their too innocent attire.
Dare they meet, the blackened wire
tears the intervening air.
Trespassers have wandered through
texture of flesh and petals.
Dogs like arrows moved along
pathways that their noses knew.
While the two who laid it out
find the metal and the flower
fatal underfoot.
Today I heard a rich and hungry boy verbatim quote
all last night’ s infomercials — an anorectic son
who bought with Daddy’ s Amex black card
the Bowflex machine and Abdomenizer,
plus a steak knife that doth slice
the inner skin of his starving arms.
Poor broken child of Eve myself,
to me, the flightless fly,
the listing, blistered, scalded.
I am the rod to their lightning.
Mine is the earhole their stories pierce.
At my altar the blouse is torn open
and the buttons sailed across
1
As so-called quarks, so atoms before and through
And after molecules, which too
Constitute us awhile, pluming
Through our slowly changing shapes
Like beachscapes
Through a duneless sandglass, say
(I said, once) — all these
So utterly forgetful, wiped clean
As numbers with each new use, lint-free.
How not so words, which pass our minds
And mouths and ears from hind-
Most elsewhere, on their way to elsewhere — why
