in the subset of
small and dark include
all the better to see you with, my dear, said the wolf
in that bonnet swiped from
the grandmother he ate. Try to figure a logic there
if you come into the story midway. Which
is every human’s condition.
Case in point: my family’s ridiculous habit,
showing up to movies halfway through. Then sitting
the same mileage into the next run—
theaters couldn’t care less, all day if you wanted—
until scenes got familiar, a runaway train, a kitchen knife
redropped. Until my mother, reduced
to a whisper: this is where we came in meant
finish your popcorn, we’re going.
If I told you
the screw-up, the backstory
of that thing I should
tell you… Ugh. Such earnestness in the world
is exhausting. Consider the local Y, full up
with the breathless on machines,
persistent perfect shapes-to-be while
the youngest among us sit poolside, stunned
to a rivet by a crushing coach.
Look at my nose! shouts the bellowed monster of the shallows.
Their little heads turn.
To sleep is to dream all the way. But too much
of that thing went on today.
I lower my head to the pillow for my brain
to be washed all night—
Because you said
that happens, that’s the drill. Whatever fluids
I had no part in making
run ragtag and rivered over my
bleak-in-there, for hours.
A Rescue
The whale might, she might vaguely recognize
human cries of those drowning
as some distant tribe of fin
and blowhole. And the damaged
submarine, her cousin once twice
three times removed, huge and gray
in the blood-let Atlantic’s notorious
cold beyond cold lined at bottom with
outrageous fish whose photos in a glossy
seasick book could wide-eye you
to some moon creature,
their razors on stalks bright-blinking
right off their heads to terrify or protect.
So the great species of the planet
unite underwater where we earth-stuck
oxygen eaters rarely look or think to look.
And on hearing those cries—
Wait, doesn’t the whale have a massive
mammal heart, a child could
run through it. That sound, such a flood
to the brain. (Brain curious as a calf in spring
folded up, tangled, still wet
from the going.) Do something! billows
and bells through the hopeless
slate-blue. The whale’s identical first
cell of us too in that watery void before
we turned sea creature here,
land breather there, damned the same to
archangel across, down deepest
lost. Stunned ocean. Unquiet.
Wound
I found a paper ruler made
to measure one exact. Up to six inches or
in centimeters, take your pick.
A little worn and bent
in one place. Now on a shelf on its
calibrated edge. Imagine
the ambulance, an EMT close, reading
tiny print. Discard
after single use. And I wonder
if shattered glass and smoking engine
got in the way of rescue, whether
the wound one inch or two, if the jagged fleshy depth
really a trapdoor the spirit took
to leave the body for good.
I have a kit in my car, a zippered black bag of
bandages and ointment, a knife, scissors in there,
and inexplicitly, rope—what else—
Endless gauze. A waterfall of gauze, a frozen field
of gauze but soft, the opposite of chain mail
knights wore into battle, told
sure, every fight is noble. But even history forgets
why oh why oh why.
Blood-rush. Garish shock of
alive! escape! An ambulance fact sheet says
abridgment, says a complete
exorcism—did
