Find and share the perfect poems.
1 Choose any angle you like, she said, the world is split in two. On one side, health and dumb good luck (or money, which can pass for both), and elsewhere . . . well, they're eight days from the nearest town, the parents are frightened, they think it's their fault, the child isn't able to suck. A thing so easily mended, provided you have the means. I've always thought it was odd, this part (my nursing school embryology), this cleft in the world that has to happen and has to heal. At first the first division, then the flood of them, then the migratory plates that make a palate when they meet (and meeting, divide the chambers, food from air). The suture through which (the upper lip) we face the world. It falls a little short sometimes, as courage does. Bolivia once, in May (I'd volunteer on my vacations), and the boy was nine. I know the world has harsher things, there wasn't a war, there wasn't malice, I know, but this one broke me down. They brought him in with a bag on his head. It was burlap, I think, or sisal. Jute. They hadn't so much as cut eyeholes. 2 (Magdalena Abakanowicz) Because the outer layer (mostly copper with a bit of zinc) is good for speed but does too little damage (what is cleaner in the muzzle—you've begun to understand—is also cleaner in the flesh), the British at Dum Dum (Calcutta) devised an "open nose," through which the leaden core, on impact, greatly expands (the lead being softer). Hence the name. And common enough in Warsaw decades later (it was 1943), despite some efforts in The Hague. I don't remember all of it, he wasn't even German, but my mother's arm— that capable arm—was severed at the shoulder, made (a single shot) a strange thing altogether. Meat. I haven't been able since to think the other way is normal, all these arms and legs. This living-in-the-body-but-not-of-it. 3 Sisal, lambswool, horsehair, hemp. The weaver and her coat-of-manyharrowings. If fiber found in situ, in agave, say, the living cells that drink and turn the sun to exoskeleton, is taken from the body that in part it constitutes (the succulent or mammal and its ex- quisite osmotics), is then carded, cut, dissevered in one fashion or another from the family of origin, and gathered on a loom, the body it becomes will ever bind it to the human and a trail of woe. Or so the garment argues. These were hung as in an abattoir. Immense (12 feet and more from upper cables to the lowest hem). And vascular, slit, with labial protrusions, skeins of fabric like intestines on the gallery floor. And beautiful, you understand. As though a tribe of intimates (the coronary plexus, said the weaver) had been summoned (even such a thing the surgeon sometimes has to stitch) to tell us, not unkindly, See, the world you have to live in is the world that you have made.
Dark still. Twelve degrees below freezing.
Tremor along
the elegant, injured right front
leg of the gelding on the cross-ties. Kneeling
girl.
The undersong of waters as she bathes
the leg in yet more cold. [tongue is broken]
[god to me]
Her hair the color of winter wheat.
1
The world's a world of trouble, your mother must
have told you
that. Poison leaks into the basements
and tedium into the schools. The oak
is going the way
of the elm in the upper Midwest—my cousin
earns a living by taking the dead ones
down.
And Jason's alive yet, the fair-
haired child, his metal crib next
to my daughter's.
Jason is nearly one year old but last
saw light five months ago and won't
see light again.
2
Leaf against leaf without malice
or forethought,
the manifold species of murmuring
harm. No harm intended, there never is.
The new
inadequate software gets the reference librarian
fired. The maintenance crew turns off power one
weekend
and Monday the lab is a morgue: fifty-four
rabbits and seventeen months of research.
Ignorance loves
as ignorance does and always
holds high office.
3
Jason had the misfortune to suffer misfortune
the third
of July. July's the month of hospital ro-
tations; on holiday weekends the venerable
stay home.
So when Jason lay blue and inert on the table
and couldn't be made to breathe for three-and-a-
quarter hours,
the staff were too green to let him go.
The household gods have abandoned us to the gods
of juris-
prudence and suburban sprawl. The curve
of new tarmac, the municipal pool,
the sky at work
on the pock-marked river, fatuous sky,
the park where idling cars, mere yards
from the slide
and the swingset, deal beautiful oblivion in nickel
bags: the admitting room and its stately drive,
possessed
of the town's best view.
4
And what's to become of the three-year-old brother?
When Jason was found
face down near the dogdish—it takes
just a cupful of water to drown—
his brother stood still
in the corner and said he was hungry
and said that it wasn't his fault.
No fault.
The fault's in nature, who will
without system or explanation
make permanent
havoc of little mistakes. A natural
mistake, the transient ill will we define
as the normal
and trust to be inconsequent,
by nature's own abundance soon absorbed.
5
Oak wilt, it's called, the new disease.
Like any such
contagion—hypocrisy in the conference room,
flattery in the hall—it works its mischief mostly
unremarked.
The men on the links haven't noticed
yet. Their form is good. They're par.
The woman who's
prospered from hating ideas loves causes
instead. A little shade, a little firewood.
I know
a stand of oak on which my father's
earthly joy depends. We're slow
to cut our losses.
The fine fourth finger of his fine right hand, just slightly, when he's tracking our path on his iPhone or repairing the clasp on my watch I will not think about the myelin sheath. Slight tremor only, transient, so the flaw in the pavement must have been my mother's back.