play, revealing how the sun refracts the panes
the maid will have to scrub. In the image,
she turns her head away, the sun
begun to bore into her eyes. And here’s a bore of sun
illuminating the bubble’s flaw that stuns the child
now blowing in the park, learning the tensile skins
can’t withstand the pressure
of a touch. “They don’t last!” he shrieks
as his mother hugs him, a squalling
aggregate of cells neither of us can hush. Of cells,
I also thought an aggravate. “Make this the sweetest
picture postcard yet,” Barratt begged Millais. And so
the painter drew a Pre-Raphaelite child at play
blinking at the globe he’s made, a lens of clean in which
the thin white etch of him sails past
in dark, the milk-white cheek, the booted
foot: the boy’s blue eyes turned in rapture to what
a parent’s invention makes. A Child’s World,
Millais titled it, but Barratt
stuck a bar of Pears in it and turned
the painting into posters, puzzles, postcards
shipped along with images of English flags
and Maori girls, kaleidoscopic
slow flash photos of bursting
bullets, their shock waves caught and used to improve
British rifle manufacturing.
“We have a perfect right
to take toys and make them into philosophy,”
my friend’s book quotes. “Inasmuch as we have turned
philosophy into toys.”
Look: a bubble of black
wobbles and bursts: explodes the world
to a slick of oil.
The clouds pull back. The boy, damp faced from his fit,
now sleeps. Sunlight holds, refracts him in his nap
as something in my friend’s face
cracks. It wildly opens.
Don’t you want one? something whispers. Don’t you, really?
Last night’s thinnest edge
of dream still wavers, the one where the doctor tells me
I am carrying, but will not tell me what
or when. Black hope rises,
bursts inside me. “It’s an aggravate of sells,” he says—
The world grows thin. My friend packs up the toys and kit,
tapping at her soapy vial.
She shakes up the foam and sticks in the pipe.
A world blows up.
The mother and child float by in it.
VESSELS
Shouldn’t it ache, this slit
into the sweet
and salt mix of waters
composing the mussel,
its labial meats
winged open: yellow-
fleshed, black and gray
around the tough
adductor? It hurts
to imagine it, regardless
of the harvester’s
denials, swiveling
his knife to make
the incision: one
dull cyst nicked
from the oyster’s
mantle—its thread of red
gland no bigger
than a seed
of trout roe—pressed
inside this mussel’s
tendered flesh.
Both hosts eased
open with a knife
(as if anything
could be said to be eased
with a knife):
so that one pearl
after another can be
harvested, polished,
added to others
until a single rope is strung
on silk. Linked
by what you think
is pain. Nothing
could be so roughly
handled and yet feel
so little, your pity
turned into part of this
production: you
with your small,
four-chambered heart,
shyness, hungers, envy: what
in you could be so precious
you would cleave
another
