a little, chokes out
water from a gaping mouth. She massages with one finger
where the lungs might be. More droplets gurgle up;
mouth to mouth is needed
along with pumping. But she can’t, not without
some small opening to blow through,
safe distance from her own mouth, which
has released a little drool, working in sympathy
as if she can convince this thing to be saved—
how hard can it be in the tame backyard pool?
And why can’t he come out of the house
with some other idea, that tumbler of straws
plain on the kitchen counter; why
for God’s sake, won’t he come out and help?
She was thinking of his explanation
as a kind of Möbius strip, circling
endlessly, seamlessly reversing and twisting
to reveal the underside, on-going words. Lost in it,
she reached down into the limited
rough space between the bed and the wall,
and her hand came up skinned, the top layer
from knuckle to wrist peeled away.
This was part of her usual vigilance—
He would spill something, lose something, and she’d
rush to wipe away, find the missing,
like this automatic retrieving of his sock—
Beaded with blood, she examined
the wide scrape in addition
to sunspots, moles, the wormy down-under,
raised-vein look of her skin. Another thing on her body
to heal outside, while inside
running through her, the ribbon of his words:
no, then yes, yes, and no again. Oh what did he want
and how could she manage to wait
for the circling to stop—
how could she keep still?
When She Spoke, He Closed His Eyes
So she tried to disappear, obliged
by his own disappearing, becoming
who she wasn’t. Not there was not
who she was, and not how she was.
She could tiptoe out, he could be
relieved or (surprise!) come searching.
But how would that work
when he needed her to be there
in order to make her gone, disappeared
into other. What other? she thought, wondering
how to make herself into someone
absent, so she could be the one
he would welcome, wide-eyed, wanting
to hear whatever it was she had to say.
1. When it began
First a fret in which everything changed.
By morning an underwater language
had overcome me.
When I tried to rise
my body said fall, and so I did.
My weighted hair, my head
turned me over. I could not hear him straight.
I was a doll with a mechanical box, the Mama
crying over and over, a dummy,
a dropped marionette.
Hold me, I said.
So sorry, he said.
2. Not making sense of it
If he was calling, I was too far under—
arm over arm
tangled in the heaving wave,
the body catching
the slap of stones,
swept through a passage.
The brain’s sea in a little box
washed in, a spinning top
come to a stop. Tilted.
•
He was walking some inert shore.
Always the lifeguard, he used to say,
eyes fixed on the water.
3. Nevertheless a common disorder
Some infection in the water, a nastiness
washing through. At first an incidental ache,
then recurring, inflaming
the air-filled cavity of the middle ear—
who knows how it starts,
how it finds the inner ear,
a spiraling labyrinth,
the fluid-filled temporal bone
where two organs live: the embedded
nerves for hearing, or mis-hearing,
