Promise

In the salmon of dawn,
when my heart burrowed tight,
small as a bird quivering
into the curve of its wing,
and the corridor was the expanse
of too many countries to name,
the two of you stood silent
as promise at the end.

And there, in that swamp, I walked on my own
through the weight of my body as nurses smiled pink,
clapping health to cheer me on.

And I knew myself as infant,
starting over,
again.

a fragment from a move

and that is why, she says, to absolutely no one at all

i am selling the bed and throwing out the dishes

and the traces of our dinners and mouths and spices and laughter all shoved

down with bad jokes and forever secrets into a box

into a box i now leave

on the sidewalk marked

FREE

in giant black letters, because yes,

the moving marker is in my hand

and the past is splayed wide open
for anyone who walks by

and happens to want a piece

and this is why i watch

as the every-day-at-this-same-time-again woman

takes 2 plates, a green-rimmed bowl, a few tattered books

before the dawn

why thank you i say around the pushed-back curtain

thank you and good bye

to worn out boots in the snow

to the silence before the coming train

to those meals and the first winter and the dark, bald branches like hunger
clamoring through the sky

             

and to the rush of the charles

blue-black-slapping 

frozen wild

to the tempo
of thank you, she's marked FREE,
on the sidewalk
the story's there.

                                                --- 2003/2012

The Nothing Hours

Ask me what happened

when the anesthesia hit, my lungs

were stopped, my heart was
silenced, and I will tell you nothing.

No tunnels or bright lights;

nothing to remember.

No outstretched arms or

family members long gone;

just my imagination,

a sketch of my body

stretched across a table. Of bright lights;

drips, hisses, bleeps; and steady, gloved hands.

Yes, that's right:

No, I wasn't there.

The Shape of Takotsubo

One afternoon she watched as the terrible storms descended. Unable to climb to the sky with her ladder and pull the clouds back together or seal the leaking shut, after several days her heart answered by opening until it was too feeble to carry her body and she fell to the ground. And now, after being rescued, after entering the hospital for the second time in less than a week, after being carried and swaddled tight in white sheets soaked heavy in the torrential rain, machines bleeped and dripped, chanted their anonymous steady promises throughout the room, and the doctor waded through rancid water to listen once again to the body nestled in her own.

What creature had taken hold to ensnare her heart in what seemed like an instant, inflating her left ventricle with its unexpected breath into the softness of a u instead of the efficient angles of a v, she asked him after he showed her the image.

Takotsubo's Syndrome he told her, his mouth stretching the word like an extended tentacle. Meaning the shape of an octopus trap.

A visitor then—for how long?

It happens sometimes; but don't worry; in most cases it goes away.

She watched them inside her: a billion worms twisting thick from a conical, glowing body, the suction-cupped arms of a violet octopus thrashing, swimming, drumming in wild, terrified protest—to to the rain, the thunder, the interrogation of the clouds mocking her with their windy chorus of whys, whys, whys—as thump, swoooosh, thump, swoooosh, thump, swoooosh slapped the tentacles and she saw the fallen ladder.

In the field under the grass the creatures slunk and hid from the storm. There they remained, nestled together until it was safe.

And lying in her drenched bed she remembered and began scouring for remnants, for a needle, a thread, a stapler, a roll of tape—something, anything—to patch up the sky. She turned from the octopus, because maybe there was a way to do it, pushed the sheets from her body, and began digging into the mattress, ripping it open with her bare hands, clawing the white stuffing away from the coils bit by bit, plundering past the bleeps and drips for the day before the rain. But she found nothing, dug until she made a hole straight through to the floor, was laughed at by the sanitized tiles, and returned bloody-armed and empty-handed as the storms continued, the water levels rose, and she began to float. Eye to eye with the octopus in its unexpected chamber.


--- Published in Tabula Rasa, Vanderbilt University Medical Center's medical humanities journal, 2012

Eulogy

That evening

when the bodies of the vultures are memories torn apart—

one draining in the ditch, the other festering on the asphalt, a row of matted feathers pointing feebly to the stars—I open the door and you tell me

the story of their deaths.

A man in a truck, with tires as high as your Camry, is coming toward you in the opposite lane; as he passes he is accelerating. There is a mad smile on his face. You watch as he starts laughing. And then as he drives even faster. In your review mirror feathered bodies soar—one, two, up, apart—thudding heavy

to the ground.

In the morning, however,

the vultures had danced

a bloody eulogy of iridescently arched necks and urgent beaks scavenging

flesh so mangled, wet, and black, it wasn't until I saw a hoof that I knew the dead one by its name.

And in the morning I watched as they became three stones.

Downy texture and sparkling viscera dissolving into form.

As distant shapes plundered themselves hungry
straight through a third. And sang together in chorus—
with the insects teeming under their claws and the flies swarming about their beaks—
the cornucopia of another day.

Nomenclature

Once you might have named her

the velvety redness of a rose unfolding—

       sun-fiery, undaunted, and open to the sky.

Or touched her

as a crimson petaled jellyfish—

       opening, closing, pulsing her body gently through salty brine.

Or known her

as the deepest well—

       a clandestine viscosity where desires undulate thick

       in a pool to overflowing.

Once you might have likened her

to the stillness of an icy dawn,
to that expansive winter hour before the world
stretches back to life and pink-blue fingers begin

unzipping the shroud of night.

Once you might have recognized her.

      
In those moments still dark

when dreams become snowflakes

echoing promises to snowy ground.

And once
you might have
described her.

As flamencoed hands
along the ribs rushing
lost, abandoned,

to the click of unrelenting castanets.

Or

as laughter, longing, need, ache, loneliness, hunger, love, poverty, and want. 

But in the days of her unraveling,
she becomes a stranger. 

And you don't know what name to speak.

Or what language you will use when you call for her again.

You don't yet realize that the heart unmoored

will grow a new chord, will become a child returning

for the umbilicus again.

Or that given time

the heart will launch herself determined

out to sea for another go.

August Song

Hear the song of August sung
through a damply cricketed froggish dance
as two cats sit in a window
and one woman reads of another
who dreams of catching autumn.

Hear the song of August sung
as this euphony is split in two
by a semi's thunderous barreling,
as a woman pauses,
and waits, for the roar of it to pass.
Wondering if it will.
Because it seems so grave it won't.

Hear the song of August sung
as just a hint of it, just a whiff
is the taste that makes a woman dream
of flight through cerulean skies, above burnt orange and crimson pulsing,
as the rumble becomes memory and the song of summer night
wraps its body around the house again.

Hear the song of August sung
as a deer languid-bodied by the window
becomes the promise of a violin
and cats stare
penetrating glass
with eyes sharp, as branches
part dark-armed, trembling
in this symphony of the instant.

Hear the song of August sung
as a woman stands
on the porch become concert hall damply
listening to this end-of-summer place,
where copperheads thread
mosaic rustlings
through tangled grass of August green.

2011