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Playing fields
We come to look at the bones.
Your hand fumbles mine, palm sticky,
wax crayon-coated. He lures us somehow,
leads us to the field’s edge, pokes with a stick, shouts:
See there. No there. We search the earth
to see the dead man’s corpse, how his skull
leaks worms, larvae burrow in sockets,
beetles, black as currants, shuttle themselves
click-clicking over shins and elbows.
He spits in his palm, makes me spit in mine,
then shake. I drop yours to do it. It’s the hottest
day of the holidays – you shiver,
chapped bottom lip hanging like a gash.
You stuff in your thumb.
I smell the barley; hear it crack in the heat.
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Cutting ties
Time, he says, is just a line
from beginning to end,
a sheared strand of string
dangling limply from
an outstretched hand.
I try to tell him that string
runs from end to end
and has no beginning, but
now he speaks of knots
and journeys and how
we unravel ourselves from
each other. I’m threadbare,
as if I’ve plucked holes
in myself since my beginnings
looped. He is whole; yards
of twine spool from him,
reminds me of a biology class,
a gash of intestines, scalpel ‒
no start or finish line.
It doesn’t matter how carefully
you pick or unpick time,
you bruise yourself to the crypt
of your bones, orphan emotions
from your core so they unpack
themselves minute by minute
in some place you’d never
willingly go, but go tonight.
Maybe I shouldn’t carry
scissors or a knife in my bag.
Maybe I shouldn’t carry time.
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Past love
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
He tells me how planets orbit each other, offers five
long-stemmed roses, red-faced, shuffles from one foot
to the other. He speaks of constellations, particles,
Telstars, ends up asking in a snatched speech, What is
the meaning of life? I wonder if now’s a good time
to tell him about you, but talk instead about the rising star
of Orion, which I know nothing about, and on a scale of
one-to-ten am hovering around three in my knowledge of the cosmos.
I hope he’ll ask again, some time when I’m ready,
but he moves effortlessly forward and the blooms of two roses
fall like stardust, soundlessly, like you did, when somehow
your life was sucked, ever so gently, from your lungs.
When I held you, there was no noise from this galaxy
or another or another, and we spent that night wondering
how the sun lit only other people, and how breathless
the universe can be when you need air the most.
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Last night
Nothing happens like winter. Not even
the clock’s slow tick next to your hospital bed
can deaden like snow. Its long, sleek crucifix hands
still drag themselves as if through drifts, ice’s fog,
to carve time’s unsteady voice
in this half-darkened ward, on this sterile night.
I walk into a whirl of flakes, mouth wide as a hole
chipped through ice so I can fish and feed you.
I think I’ve been an Inuit at some time past,
culled a seal, pulled its pelt from shoulder
to cheek just to keep warm. I check on my children,
burrowed in furs, every hour of their waking.
When they’re asleep I still pinch and poke them
with an ungloved forefinger and thumb,
know I love them more than time itself –
know time isn’t forever, that it can melt
any day now and I’ll lose myself in a river of you,
slide behind in slippers of meltwater.
You breathe frost on the clock’s face. And it stops.
My veins are blurred with cold, skin just a mist in air.
Is it you who is leaving my touch?
I can’t take my hands from you, though the nurse tugs.
I can’t take the way you are thawing
when I’ve shut the blinds to keep out morning’s light.
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Where you used to be
Your shape is here again, slides into your chair,
as if every night you’re fastened to cushions,
stripping feathers from your wings like silence.
I flick the TV ‒ channel by channel ‒ until shadows...
