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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.
Except for the shirt pulled from the ocean, except for her hands, which keep folding the shirt, except for her body, which once held their bodies, my sister wants everything back now-- If there were a god who could out of empty shells carried by waves to shore make amends-- If the ocean saved in a jar could keep from turning to salt-- She's hearing things: bird calling to bird, cat outside the door, thorn of the blackberry against the trellis.
This evening I shared a cab with a priest who said it was a fine day to ride cross town with a writer. But I can't finish the play I said, it's full of snow. The jaywalkers walked slowly, a cigarette warmed someone's hand. Some of the best sermons don't have endings, he said while the tires rotated unceasingly beneath us. All over town people were waiting and doubleparked and making love and waiting. The temperature dropped until the shiverers zipped their jackets and all manner of things started up again.
iv.
I know agape means both dumbly
open and love not the kind of love
that climbed the stairs to you.