Because I am not married, I have the skin of an orange 

that has spent its life in the dark. Inside the orange 
I am blind. I cannot tell when a hand reaches in 

and breaks the atoms of the blood. Sometimes
 
a blackbird will bring the wind into my hair. 
Or the yellow clouds falling on the cold floor are animals 

beginning to fight each other out of their drifting misery. 

All the women I have known have been ruined by fog 
and the deer crossing the field at night. 

My friend says she is like an empty drawer 

being pulled out of the earth. 
I am the long neck of the giraffe coming down 

to see what she doesn't have. 

What holds us chained to the same cold river, 
where we are surprised by the circles 

we make in the ice? When we talk about the past

it is like pushing stones back into the earth. 
Sometimes she digs her nails into her leather bag 

to find out where my heart is. The white sleeves

of her shirt are bright with waves when I visit. 
When we lie, we live a little longer—

which is unbelievable. If you love 

someone, the water moves up from the well. 

When I talk to my friends I pretend I am standing on the wings 

of a flying plane. I cannot be trusted to tell them how I am. 
Or if I am falling to earth weighing less 

than a dozen roses. Sometimes I dream they have broken up 

with their lovers and are carrying food to my house. 
When I open the mailbox I hear their voices 

like the long upward-winding curve of a train whistle 

passing through the tall grasses and ferns 
after the train has passed. I never get ahead of their shadows. 

I embrace them in front of moving cars. I keep them away 

from my miseries because to say I am miserable is to say I am like them. 

My only mother, who lost sixty pounds, tried to stand up in the bathroom 

and fell backwards on the white linoleum floor in the first hour of the morning 
and was carried to the bed in the nurse's arms and then abruptly 

opened her eyes, later, the room dark, and twisted the needles in her arms 

and talked to her dead friend, Rosie, and heard the doorbell ring 
as though in the kitchen in the old place deciding if she should answer, 

rubbing the circle on her finger where the wedding ring once was 

while slipping downward on the sheets like a body without limbs and I slid 
my good arms beneath her arm-pits and pulled her bony body up 

against the two thin pillows. And then, when she was asleep again, 

I walked down the hallway's arc of yellow light, ghosts hovering 
on either side of the doors of rooms where the strange sickness 

of being alive was the last thing between dreaming and eternity 

which closes like the ocean closes over the blue-starry body 
and does not stop, and I understood again that we never come back, 

and upright, with everything that takes its life seriously, I returned to my mother. 

three feet behind my grin I speak
so seems my teeth is down for it
but it’s a make-do I do.
I DM P. L. Dunbar on some 
whatchu mean “we?” no—
really, though. the rough metric
opening this a lie to make 
done the otherwise I say I is.
yet, the we I been subtweets 
me—“whatchu mean ‘I?’”—
answer’s off my tongue, so: 
authentic, no? where “fine,” “OK,”
“yes” get forged? I split my difference
between here and gone, 
a distance of hard words 
hissed; presence of the harms’
numb climb: I’m fine, I’m fine.

          If many remedies are prescribed
          for an illness, you may be certain
          that the illness has no cure.
                              —A. P. CHEKHOV
                             The Cherry Orchard

1  FROM THE NURSERY
When I was born, you waited 
behind a pile of linen in the nursery, 
and when we were alone, you lay down 
on top of me, pressing
the bile of desolation into every pore.
And from that day on 
everything under the sun and moon 
made me sad—even the yellow 
wooden beads that slid and spun 
along a spindle on my crib.
You taught me to exist without gratitude. 
You ruined my manners toward God:
“We’re here simply to wait for death; 
the pleasures of earth are overrated.”
I only appeared to belong to my mother, 
to live among blocks and cotton undershirts 
with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes
and report cards in ugly brown slipcases. 
I was already yours—the anti-urge, 
the mutilator of souls.
2  BOTTLES
Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin, 
Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax, 
Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft. 
The coated ones smell sweet or have 
no smell; the powdery ones smell 
like the chemistry lab at school 
that made me hold my breath.
3  SUGGESTION FROM A FRIEND
You wouldn’t be so depressed
if you really believed in God.
4  OFTEN
Often I go to bed as soon after dinner 
as seems adult
(I mean I try to wait for dark)
in order to push away 
from the massive pain in sleep’s 
frail wicker coracle.
5  ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT
Once, in my early thirties, I saw 
that I was a speck of light in the great 
river of light that undulates through time.
I was floating with the whole 
human family. We were all colors—those 
who are living now, those who have died, 
those who are not yet born. For a few
moments I floated, completely calm, 
and I no longer hated having to exist.
Like a crow who smells hot blood 
you came flying to pull me out 
of the glowing stream.
“I’ll hold you up. I never let my dear 
ones drown!” After that, I wept for days.
6  IN AND OUT
The dog searches until he finds me 
upstairs, lies down with a clatter 
of elbows, puts his head on my foot.
Sometimes the sound of his breathing 
saves my life—in and out, in 
and out; a pause, a long sigh. . . . 
7  PARDON
A piece of burned meat 
wears my clothes, speaks 
in my voice, dispatches obligations 
haltingly, or not at all.
It is tired of trying 
to be stouthearted, tired 
beyond measure.
We move on to the monoamine 
oxidase inhibitors. Day and night 
I feel as if I had drunk six cups 
of coffee, but the pain stops
abruptly. With the wonder 
and bitterness of someone pardoned 
for a crime she did not commit 
I come back to marriage and friends, 
to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back 
to my desk, books, and chair.
8  CREDO
Pharmaceutical wonders are at work 
but I believe only in this moment 
of well-being. Unholy ghost, 
you are certain to come again.
Coarse, mean, you’ll put your feet 
on the coffee table, lean back, 
and turn me into someone who can’t 
take the trouble to speak; someone 
who can’t sleep, or who does nothing 
but sleep; can’t read, or call 
for an appointment for help.
There is nothing I can do 
against your coming. 
When I awake, I am still with thee.
9  WOOD THRUSH
High on Nardil and June light 
I wake at four, 
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air 
presses through the screen 
with the wild, complex song 
of the bird, and I am overcome
by ordinary contentment. 
What hurt me so terribly 
all my life until this moment? 
How I love the small, swiftly 
beating heart of the bird 
singing in the great maples; 
its bright, unequivocal eye.

Whenever I spend the day crying, 
my friends tell me I look high. Good grief,  

they finally understand me.  
Even when the arena is empty, I thank god  

for the shots I miss. If you ever catch me  
only thanking god for the shots I make,  

remind me I’m not thanking god. Remind me  
all my prayers were answered  

the moment I started praying  
for what I already have.  

Jenny says when people ask if she’s out of the woods,  
she tells them she’ll never be out of the woods,  

says there is something lovely about the woods.  
I know how to build a survival shelter  

from fallen tree branches, packed mud,  
and pulled moss. I could survive forever  

on death alone. Wasn’t it death that taught me  
to stop measuring my lifespan by length,

but by width? Do you know how many beautiful things  
can be seen in a single second? How you can blow up

a second like a balloon and fit infinity inside of it? 
I’m infinite, I know, but I still have a measly wrinkle

collection compared to my end goal. I would love  
to be a before picture, I think, as I look in the mirror

and mistake my head for the moon. My dark  
thoughts are almost always 238,856 miles away 

from me believing them. I love this life, 
I whisper into my doctor’s stethoscope

so she can hear my heart. My heart, an heirloom
I didn’t inherit until I thought I could die.

Why did I go so long believing I owed the world
my disappointment? Why did I want to take

the world by storm when I could have taken it
by sunshine, by rosewater, by the cactus flowers

on the side of the road where I broke down?
I’m not about to waste more time

spinning stories about how much time
I’m owed, but there is a man

who is usually here, who isn’t today.  
I don’t know if he’s still alive. I just know

his wife was made of so much hope  
she looked like a firework above his chair.

Will the afterlife be harder if I remember
the people I love, or forget them?

Either way, please let me remember.

Being the Oldest Daughter


My mother’s death is another body: she flaunts herself, takes up too much

space in the marriage bed, ruins my closet, wears my best black skirt,

side-zipped up her thigh. Spins and twirls in my slip,

color of a baby aspirin, color of a dulled sun. As if now my mother refuses

to be a mother, has no interest in the children

who cry for her, demand Sippy cups of milk, want

to settle in her arms in my favorite green chair.

She won’t touch them, refuses every embrace.

But don’t worry: soon her death will undress herself, she’ll unveil, but never

in the dark, she wants all the lights on, she loves cheap

fluorescence.


Silence


Don’t talk to me about the throat, the lungs, any red road to the body’s interior.

Don’t talk to me about how, for so long, it was my favorite metaphor.

Now I picture my mother’s lungs.

Being the Oldest Daughter 

who gets the texts on her phone: peace, love and strength to you!
Thinking of you! Stay strong!
Who is offered gifts of scented bath crystals, body wash?
Important to stay clean and lovely.

Let me know what you need, people say.
Maybe I need nothing.

Alone I roll away curled in a blue cotton blanket bundled like a child.


Metaphors for a Different Ending


An endoscope’s black and silver fish tail.
PET Scan machine a big plastic donut, un-sugared.
MRI, loud as a car crash.
IV drip a watery popsicle.

But she refused all treatment. And so the tenor and the vehicle split apart.

Being the Oldest Daughter

Walking out of the hospital into late morning brightness in New Orleans with my sister,
after giving away our mother's glasses,
on Jefferson Highway, watching the people our age, perfectly healthy and well,
people who still have mothers,

I’m filled with fury at everyone’s good health—


The Tenor and the Vehicle


Grief is a plate scraped clean.

Grief is a sun-bleached sheet.

Or none. Or neither. It’s a dish rag she used in the kitchen, stuffed at the back of a drawer, torn,
mildew dark—

^{Whitney cottage, Hermitage Artist Retreat}

You could write about the windows
all nine of them. You could write about 

the gulf, red tide strangling Florida’s 
shore, the opaque eyes of dead fish

caught in the algal bloom. You could write 
about the sky—long as a yawn, sky blue

chasing cerulean away, stretched wisps
of white determined to be the canvas 

for another sunset showstopper. But the body
has its own narrative in mind. Neurons hustling 

pain blank out any page. No writing can be done 
when an electric snare corrals the brain. No ear 

searching for song while one temple pulses 
an arrhythmic lament. Mercifully there’s triptan, 

a black curtain over this inflammatory act. Strike
through today, uncap the pen again tomorrow.

I got the Covid blues
Hazmat outfit to read the news
I gots that damn viral blues
Mystifying perspiring invisible shit
Blowing through the wind like

Yesterday’s news blues
I can’t think breathe or snooze
I gots the rumble rumble chest-rattly 
Bubble gut blues 
I’ve been sanitized ostracized hydrogen peroxide

Cleaner than hospital sheet blues
My tears are sterilized 
My fears capsized spilling
Out over my broke bedtime blues
So much so I’m afraid 

To read the news
I got the Covid-19 stockpile
Body bag blues
Them refrigerated truck blues
Them Roto-Rooter blues

Them hack and wheeze double-
Sneeze Vicks VapoRub Robitussin
Preparation H body ache earthquake 
Ha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha blues
I’ve got them we wear the mask blues

Them hand sanitizer hydroxychloroquine booze blues
Them broke heel hole in the sole blues
Squeaky wheel lungs like shredded wheat blues
I got them lockdown shutdown god awful blues
Them loveless touchless cold sheet blues

I got it real bad, them blues
My head is heavy as a brick
I can’t sleep I’m scared to get sick
I’m so paranoid I can’t stop my eye twitch 
Wake up in a hyperventilating sweat blues

I gots them Hail Mary, full of grace
Garlic string around my neck 
Get thee behind me, Satan blues 
Them TB smallpox blanket diphtheria Typhoid Mary
Love in the time of cholera blues blues

Them Brueghel Triumph of Death
Black lungs matter Black Orpheus
Peach Schnapps Doctor Schnabel von Rom
Beak-nosed bleary-eyed cloak and swagger
Death, with occasional smiling blues

I gots them backwater fever swamp 
Florida Water espíritu santos Tuskegee 
What had happened was anti-vax
Death be not proud snot-nosed 
Sitting shiva novena reincarnation

Take it all back blues

We get used to trash along the road 
or don’t even have to get used to it 
but then some kids put their beer cans 
on the tips of small trees trying to come up. 
Little star. Now I know the cancer 
is in my body and always will be. 
Still, we can convince ourselves 
of anything. When Bea wants to play, 
that’s what I do. She gets under the covers 
and pretends to be part of my body. 
We tell her daddy she’s gone, 
but she’s right there. I say 
this is just me.

^{a variant of Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet XVII}

I don’t love you as if you were penicillin, 
insulin, or chemotherapy drugs that treat cancer,
I love you as one loves the sickest patient:
terminally, between the diagnosis and the death. 

I love you as one loves new vaccines frozen 
within the lab, poised to stimulate our antibodies,
and thanks to your love, the immunity that protects 
me from disease will respond strongly in my cells.

I love you without knowing how or when this pandemic 
will end. I love you carefully, with double masking. 
I love you like this because we can’t quarantine 

forever in the shelter of social distancing, 
so close that your viral load is mine,
so close that your curve rises with my cough.

absentee lungs : old abuses surfacing in new aches : alcohol wipes, 70% : besieged by her lover’s worry, she consults a bot about her symptoms : cardboard boxes accumulating in her blue bin : construction continues outside her bedroom window twelve hours a day : contact-hungry, she rambles to her lover’s apartment, mashing crosswalk buttons with her elbow : doctors, she reads, have begun to ration care : empty hotel rooms wild across the downtown corridor : encampments erupt beneath expressways : friendly conversation yelled over a rift of cars : the future, suddenly detonated : golden retrievers glimpse each other from afar, forlornly : she hews to idle streets : jangles the keys at her lover’s back door : life & life & life & : a list of events, postponed indefinitely : live music, family reunions, surgeries : elective, supposedly : she lathers glacially between every finger : masks pile up in waste disposal : her clothes pile up on the floor : no going back, not anymore : nurses divert patients to tents in the parking lot : one knuckle at a time, laboring in soap and hot water : parents touch hands with children through Plexiglass screens : plaintive letters dropped in mailboxes, reaching past quarantine : her pre-existing conditions include swollen lungs, race, a lack of self-preservation : quote : Reno said some people are too expensive to save : she hears her own name : she hears the harness tighten : skin on leather on metal on skin : the bottom line is, Jeff Bezos makes the cost of 3,140,000 ventilators in a year : six ventilators in a minute : her lover buys her tulips from the corner store, their stems sterilized in bleach : a voicemail from public health tells her to stay home : warehouse workers without paid sick leave fill her sanitizer order : she disinfects the light switches for two minutes straight : if it takes x hours to unzip her hands from her lover’s hair, what is the likelihood they will both fall sick : yesterday, she licked every doorknob in the hallway : she knows her old stories : the sacrifices they urge : down to the last word : the last letter

Not once—not when I toppled, rigid, a
5'7" pine felled,
stiff as a board, a five and a half foot
plank, 16 x 32,
and not while I wallowed on the rug among
his oxygen tubes and my cane and his 8
wheelchair wheels, and not when I sat by his
hospice bed, chirping I’m fine!,
and not the next day, when the brilliant violet
and black slash-slathered in my easy-life skin,
or days later when the purple turned yellow and the
blue green—never once when I
said No pain, Nothing broken,
did I feel lucky, did I measure the force of the
blow, the floor speeding up like a heavy-weight’s
smash to my cheek and eyebrow, not until
today, did I begin to feel
grateful for my good fortune—no concussion, no
fracture—as if I expected to be able to be
struck by the earth, a wrecking ball,
and not feel it—
as when someone on the other side of the world,
or the city, is struck in my name, I do not feel it.

^{“Pain blesses the body back to its sinner”
            —Ocean Vuong}

Handcuffs around my wrists 
lined with synthetic fur, my arms bound 

& hoisted, heavenward, as if in praise.
Once, bodies like mine were seen as a symptom

of sin, something to be prayed away;
how once, priests beat themselves to sanctify

the flesh. To put their sins to death. Now,
my clothes scatter across the floor like petals

lanced by hail. Motion stretches objects 
in the eye. A drop of rain remade, 

a needle, a blade. Mark how muscle fiber 
& piano strings both, when struck, ring. 

No music without violence or wind. 

I’ve been searching the backs of lover’s hands
for a kinder score, a pain that makes 

my pain a stranger tune. Still, my body aches 
an ugly psalm. All my bones refuse to harm

-onize. Percussion is our oldest form of song, 
wind bruised into melody. Let me say this plainly:

I want you to beat me 

into a pain that’s unfamiliar. How convenient 
this word, beat, that lives in both the kingdoms 

of brutality & song. The singer’s voice: a cry, 
a moan, god’s name broken across a blade 

of teeth. The riding crop & flog & scourge—
a wicked faith. A blood-loud devotion.  

There is no prayer to save me from my flesh. 
You can’t have the bible without the belt.

Neighbors nail the planks
dividing their yard from mine.
Our durable fence.

I walk half a block
before realizing I’ve
forgotten my mask.

One ant following
another, trusting we all
are going somewhere.

Stretched between two poles,
clothesline outside my window,
a robin’s rest stop.

Lemons fallen on
the sidewalk to be rescued
for my potpourri.

No one and nothing
touches me but this blue wind
with cool caresses.

Never knew a thing about the Saint

Vincent, hearty name

a comforting stew

in a violent December

the first ward to welcome

the men who would become

my children until mothers

chose God over religion

love over blame

woke up from the stupor of shame

that worst of all AIDS complications

Jealous mothers

returned afraid

awake that I might take their place

after one found me in bed

putting love into lesions

fields of killer berries blue

heralds of final breaths

our bodies gently threaded in tenderness

word got around

the best doctors looked away

nurses never saw a thing

as we snuggled, giggled

careful not to unplug anything

the joy of Popsicles

the birthday cakes

the friends who came

the ones who didn’t

hard conversations

thinking about the daddy

you wish you had

made you mad

so many orphans of the living

be the daddy, don’t dream the daddy

daddy’s not coming

be the daddy you wish you had

don’t get jealous

get alive and live to the bone

of all the love you have to give

send your neighbor a prayer, a chocolate, a kiss

don’t miss the daddy, be the daddy

tell the bedtime story

we can all tuck each other in

be the daddy to the boy dying

days before you

become the breath you barely have

be the orchestra section of another’s life

the days endless with machines, medications

necessary interrogations

interruptions of sleep by front line miracle dreams

I wear my Reverend Mother disguise

so I can stay through the night

You make me promise

they’ll honor the DNR

no matter how you beg

whatever look of despair

comes into your eyes

You know what you want

while you still own your mind

When mama finally arrives

you’re still alive

I kiss you every time

always the chance of good-bye

The AIDS wards

Where lifetimes were lived

in moments.

Where Death wrapped us in the mercy

of seeing life for the very first time

the immortality

of Love threading body to soul

with tenderness.

Never gone too far.

Arriving late, my clinic having run
past 6 again, I realize I don’t
have cancer, don’t have HIV, like them,
these students who are patients, who I lead
in writing exercises, reading poems.
For them, this isn’t academic, it’s
reality:  I ask that they describe
an object right in front of them, to make
it come alive, and one writes about death,
her death, as if by just imagining
the softness of its skin, its panting rush
into her lap, that she might tame it; one
observes instead the love he lost, he’s there,
beside him in his gown and wheelchair,
together finally again.  I take
a good, long breath; we’re quiet as newborns.
The little conference room grows warm, and right
before my eyes, I see that what I thought
unspeakable was more than this, was hope.

When we first met, my heart pounded. They said
the shock of it was probably what broke
his heart. In search of peace, we traveled once
to Finland, tasted reindeer heart. It seemed
so heartless, how you wanted it to end.
I noticed on the nurse who took his pulse
a heart tattooed above her collarbone.
The kids played hearts all night to pass the time.
You said that at its heart rejection was
impossible to understand. “We send
our heartfelt sympathy,” was written in
the card your mother sent, in flowing script.
I tried interpreting his EKG,
which looked like knife wounds to the heart. I knew
enough to guess he wouldn’t last much longer.
As if we’d learned our lines by heart, you said,
“I can’t explain.” “Please don’t,” was my reply.
They say the heart is just a muscle. Or
the heart is where the human soul resides.
I saw myself in you; you looked so much
like him. You didn’t have the heart to say
you didn’t want me anymore. I still
can see that plastic statue: Jesus Christ,
his sacred heart aflame, held out in his
own hands. He finally let go. How grief
this great is borne, not felt. Borne in the heart.

I used to dream of living here. I hike
a trail I know that at the end opens

to glorious views of the city I did
live in once, when men my age kept dying

while I learned how to diagnose AIDS.
Some dreams don’t come true, and some dreams become

nightmares. Across a field that smells of sage,
a few horses loiter. I want to think

that they forgive me, since they’re noble creatures.
They stamp and snort, reminding me they know

nothing of forgiveness. I used to dream
that someday I’d escape to San Francisco,

when I was still in high school and I knew.
Tall and muscled, the horses are like the jocks

on the football team who beat me once, as if pain
teaches truth and they knew I had to learn.

I used to dream I was as white as them,
that I could slam my locker closed and not

think of jail. Some nightmares come true,
like when my uncle got arrested for

cocaine. My family never talked about it,
which made me realize they could also feel shame.

That’s when I started dreaming I could be
a doctor someday, that I could get away,

prescribe myself a new life. Right now, as
the city comes into view, I think of those

animals and hope they got what they deserved.
The city stretches out its arms, its two bridges

to Oakland, to Stockton, to San Rafael,
to Vallejo; places I could have been from

but wasn’t. It looks just as it did
all those years ago. Yet I know it’s changed

because so many of us died, like Rico,
who took me up here for the first time.

We kicked a soccer ball around and smoked
a joint. I think we talked about our dreams,

but who can remember dreams. I look out
and the sun like your hand on my face

is warm, and for a moment I think this is
glorious, this is what forgiveness feels like.

While jogging on the treadmill at the gym,
that exercise in getting nowhere fast,
I realized we need a health pandemic.
Obesity writ large no more, Alzheimer's
forgotten, we could live carefree again.
We'd chant the painted shaman's sweaty oaths,
We'd kiss the awful relics of the saints,
we'd sip the bitter tea from twisted roots,
we'd listen to our grandmothers' advice.
We'd understand the moonlight's whispering.
We'd exercise by making love outside, 
and afterwards, while thinking only of
how much we'd lived in just one moment's time,
forgive ourselves for wanting something more:
to praise the memory of long-lost need,
or not to live forever in a world 
made painless by our incurable joy.

      I

Admitted to the hospital again.

The second bout of pneumocystis back

In January almost killed him; then,

He'd sworn to us he'd die at home.  He baked

Us cookies, which the student wouldn't eat,

Before he left--the kitchen on 5A

Is small, but serviceable and neat.

He told me stories: Richard Gere was gay

And sleeping with a friend if his, and AIDS

Was an elaborate conspiracy

Effected by the government.  He stayed

Four months. He lost his sight to CMV.

      II

One day, I drew his blood, and while I did

He laughed, and said I was his girlfriend now,

His blood-brother.  "Vampire-slut," he cried,

"You'll make me live forever!" Wrinkled brows

Were all I managed in reply.  I know

I'm drowning in his blood, his purple blood.

I filled my seven tubes; the warmth was slow

To leave them, pressed inside my palm.  I'm sad

Because he doesn't see my face.  Because

I can't identify with him.  I hate

The fact that he's my age, and that across

My skin he's there, my blood-brother, my mate.

      III

He said I was too nice, and after all

If Jodie Foster was a lesbian,

Then doctors could be queer.  Residual

Guilts tingled down my spine.  "OK, I'm done,"

I said as I withdrew the needle from

His back, and pressed.  The CSF was clear;

I never answered him.  That spot was framed

In sterile, paper drapes.  He was so near

Death, telling him seemed pointless.  Then, he died.

Unrecognizable to anyone

But me, he left my needles deep inside

His joking heart.  An autopsy was done.

      IV

I'd read to him at night. His horoscope,

The New York Times, The Advocate;

Some lines by Richard Howard gave us hope.

A quiet hospital is infinite,

The polished, ice-white floors, the darkened halls

That lead to almost anywhere, to death

Or ghostly, lighted Coke machines.  I call

To him one night, at home, asleep.  His breath,

I dreamed, had filled my lungs--his lips, my lips

Had touched.  I felt as though I'd touched a shrine.

Not disrespectfully, but in some lapse

Of concentration.  In a mirror shines

The distant moon.

          how do I admit I’m almost glad of it?

          the way it’s scraped off
          those flash-storms of rage

          I grew delicately-feathered
          luna moth antennae
          to fine-tune your emotional weather:
          sometimes a barometric shift
          in the house’s atmosphere / a tight
          quickening / some hard dark shadow
          flickering glossy as obsidian
          pulled down like a nightshade
          behind your irises / but sometimes
          you struck with no warning at all
          rattlesnaked fang of lightning
          incinerating my moon-pale wings
          to crumpled cinder and ash

          now your memory resets
          itself every night / a button
          clearing the trip odometer
          back to zero / dim absinthe fizz
          of radium-green glow
          from the dashboard half-lifing
          a midnight rollover from
          omega to alpha to omega

          I remember when you told me
          (maybe I was three?)
          I was mentally damaged
          like the boy across the street /
          said you’d help me pass
          for normal so no one would know
          but only if I swore to obey
          you / and only you / forever

          now your memory fins
          around and around / like
          the shiny obsessive lassos
          of a goldfish gold-banding
          the narrow perimeters
          of its too-small bowl

          coming home from school
          (maybe I was fifteen?)
          you were waiting for me
          just inside the front door /
          accused me of stealing a can
          of corned beef hash from
          the canned goods stashed
          in the basement / then beat me
          in the face with your shoe

          how do I admit I’m almost glad of it?
          that I’ve always pined for you
          like an unrequited love / though I
          was never beautiful enough
          for you / your tinned bright laugh
          shrapneled flecks of steel to hide
          your anger when people used to say
          we looked like one another

          but now we compare
          our same dimpled hands /
          the thick feathering of eyebrows
          with the same crooked wing
          birdwinging over our left eye /
          our uneven cheekbones making
          one half of our face rounder
          than the other / one side
          a full moon / the other side
          a shyer kind of moon

          how can I admit I’m almost glad of it
          when you no longer recognize
          yourself in photographs
          the mirror becoming stranger
          until one day—will it be soon?—
          you’ll look in my face / once again
          seeing nothing of yourself
          reflected in it, and—unsure
          of all that you were and all
          that you are—ask me: who are you?

The lord doctor sits on the other side
of health from me. It’s a wall come between
flat & white &
spackled in places—

I was a student of ELOQUENCE.
I’d shape my mouth into a fountain
& out the names cascaded in June—

My brain is described in slow sentences
in similes like: grapefruit, telephones,
the medieval district of a city.

In ELOQUENCE though I couldn't fit
the madness in—no icy jackhammer
pneumatics, no I-can’t-hear-myself-think

Progress: the loss of neuron & synapse
Progress: tall lights of a stadium shut
one by one until the ballpark is left
in darkness. Then degeneration of
the temporal. Then furrows will close
the furrows the cheering voices carved
in the air will close. This is what happens—

cerebellum, the beautifulest sound
in the room

I rested my length in its green meadows.

Nothing better to do than watch
each drop of Cytoxan shimmy

down a see-through tube
to anoint the chosen vein.

You could turn to the window’s maple,
smoldering in autumn sun,

to catch the precise nanosecond
when leaf detaches from limb—

stare down a likely candidate,
curled and tinged with brown.

A nudge from the wind
might encourage the scene along,

but even then, if the angle of light
isn’t just so, you’d miss

the shadow of falling leaf many yards
beyond the trunk, hitting asphalt

and racing toward its embodied self.
When leaf touches ground,

does its shadow ascend?
In these shortened days of fall,

I look for signs of renewal.
Look how the sun flares

bonfire orange and gold
as it clings to the west. Listen!

Can you still hear the freight train’s
burst of horn displacing the air,

after the last boxcar
slinks behind the farthest hill?

Do only laws of physics apply?
In old movie frames, I see my mother’s

young face, gardenia-pale
against dark curls. She is waving,

climbing terraced steps to a lake.
I reverse the reel at will,

my mother backing down
the stairs, then floating up again.

Floating above the gynecologist’s hands,
Dolor looks down at me
with her many expressions.

Someone sketched the eyes, the mouths,
someone pinned them up,
arranged the faces

so they softly say, like this? like this?
The doctor says to choose one,
but I’m no fool, I close my eyes

and the speculum is blind and cool,
widened and distracting.
Like the Chikyū vessel drilling

downhole from the ocean floor
into the untouched mantle,
it shows we’re scarred inside

by what years and use and trespass do.
Every day the women open their eyes
and follow me into the streets,

the cities, like a wind murmur begins
a rumor of waves, the faces of earth
saying let this pain be error upon me writ.

When I woke for school the next day the sky was uniform & less than infinite

with the confusion of autumn & my father

as he became distant with disease the way a boy falls beneath the ice,
before the men that cannot save him—

the cold like a forever on his lips.

Soon, he was never up before us & we’d jump on the bed,
wake up, wake up,

& my sister’s hair was still in curls then, & my favorite photograph still hung:
my father’s back to us, leading a bicycle uphill.

At the top, the roads vanish & turn—

the leaves leant yellow in a frozen sprint of light, & there, the forward motion.

The nights I laid in the crutch of my parents’ doorway & dreamt awake,
listened like a field of snow,

I heard no answer. Then sleepless slept in my own arms beneath the window
to the teacher’s blank & lull—

Mrs. Belmont’s lesson on Eden that year. Autumn: dusk:

my bicycle beside me in the withered & yet-to-be leaves,

& my eyes closed fast beneath the mystery of migration, the flock’s rippled wake:

             There are many reasons why a woman falls
      to the floor. An optimist surely imagines
lovemaking, or the uncontrollable writhing

             of modern dance that sweeps across the stage,
      not a harsh plunge onto hardwood, the tumble
so sudden one thinks the old furniture

             has slipped, crashed, cracked the tile.
      Let’s work backward. She is lying there
screaming her husband’s name. The right

             tube gave up, gave out
      like an old rubber tire does after much
wear. All it needed was a nail. All it took

             was an embryo to get stuck along its path,
      the pressure unbearable, and the day before
no increased human chorionic gonadotropin,

             though twenty days of bleeding while
      going back and forth to the hardware store
to mend the fixer-upper, same age as her,

             fallen siding, withered eaves,
      should have been the obvious sign.
So, she is lying there and the husband

             rushes her to the emergency room
      and she does not die as the doctor
said she would have had she not signed

             the paperwork. When she wakes
      she discovers the tube is gone,
couldn’t be saved. On the television

             an old black and white with wagons,
      women in ankle-length skirts, poke
bonnets almost like a trap for hair,

             boots full of dust, their hands rough
      as pumice stone. And if these
settlers fell to the floor, she wonders,

             who would come, who would hear them
      and realize those long aprons had become
flags fluttering at the cabin door?

Lately we invite this stranger into our home
to watch over, like an angel or good dog,
                                                                          our son.

But she is not angelic, not graceful, her slippers
flopping like sad clown shoes. And it’s wrong

to compare this nurse to a dog, especially
that kind of dog: trusted, beloved. We need her

so we hate her, even though it is—must be—our fault
she’s here
                   —he is our son—
                                                  so we give

instructions and thanks before quarantining
in our room
                      where we sourly purse our eyes

toward sleep while she is paid
                                                      to guard our son against
that more familiar stranger, who should have

no business with a child,
                                            not now, not here. But endings
are always near. Passing our door, her steps

sound too like anxious foot-tapping, strangers
impatient to leave with
                                           what they’ve come to collect.

For the first time tonight,
as I put my wife to bed
I didn't have to shove her off me.

She turned away in her sleep.

I wondered what was wrong with my chest.

I felt it, and the collar bone
spiked up, and where she'd rest
her cheek were ribs.

Who wants to cuddle a skeleton?

My skeleton wandered from the house
and out onto the street.

He came, after much wandering, to the edge of a bay
where a long bridge headed out—
the kind that hangs itself with steel

and sways as if the wind could take
away its weight.

There were mountains in the distance—
triangles of cardboard—
or perhaps the mist was tricking his eyes.

The instant the mist made him doubtful,
it turned to rain.

The rain covered everything. The holes
in his face were so heavy
he wondered if the water was thickening—
if he was leaching into them.

He panicked. Perhaps he was gunked up
with that disgusting paste,
flesh, all over again.

If I were alive I'd have told him
I was nothing like what he was feeling—

that the rain felt more like
the shell of a crab
than the way I'd held him.

That it felt more like him.

But I wasn't alive—
I was the ghost in the bridge
willing the cars to join me,

telling them that death was not wind,
was not weight,

was not mist,
and certainly not the mountains—

that it was the breaking apart,

the replacement of who, when, how, and where
with what.

When my skeleton looked down
he was corrupted

in the femur by fracture,
something swelling within.

Out of him leaked pink moss.
Water took it away.

Today I woke up in my body
and wasn’t that body anymore.
 
It’s more like my dog—
for the most part obedient,
warming to me
when I slip it goldfish or toast,
 
but it sheds.
Can’t get past a simple sit,
stay, turn over. House-trained, but not entirely.
 
This doesn’t mean it’s time to say goodbye.
 
I’ve realized the estrangement
is temporary, and for my own good:
 
My body’s work to break the world
into bricks and sticks
has turned inward.
 
As all the doors in the world
grow heavy
a big white bed is being put up in my heart.

An old man is playing fiddle in my head.
At least that’s what the doctor says,
pointing, as he holds my MRI to the light.

He must be eating the same hotdogs
my nephew microwaves. My nephew sees
Bob the Builder everywhere—smiling

in sauerkraut, sawing in the drifting sky.
Afternoons he names me Bob, knocks
my knee with a plastic hammer. I’m half-

naked, shivery with chicken skin,
napkin-gowned. But I don’t laugh
because I think the veined cobweb

looks like Abe Lincoln’s profile on the penny.
So let’s pretend I’m not sick at all.
I’m filled with golden tumors—

love for the nurse who feeds me
to the machine. The machine worse
than any death—the powerlessness

of a shaved & strapped-down body.
Even in purgatory you can wear earrings
& though the music might crack a spine,

at least in that torture, the tears from your arm’s
needle marks are mouth-wateringly sweet.

Ignoring the doctor’s red call
                    I swam in the molasses-thick swamp
          of my indulgence, allowed the sugar to ruin

the picnic. The lawn beneath me humming
                    with little invaders.
          There are conditions if one insists

on knowing the secrets of my blood.
                    I know it’s hard to gaze at the night sky
          speckled white & not wish upon

the dead light, but I ask only for your laughter.
                    I ask for all the ways I can remain
          whole & not a vision with missing limbs.

Look at the trees blistering with sap. Goddamnit
                    look at me! Look at me in the old way
          in this new light.

Once I loved a boy, who feared, so much
                    his own sickness
          I never confessed to him my own.

Afraid he would turn, with his worry, my smile
                    into a knife—into a scythe
          covered in ants.