the worship in the way he reaches toward earth,
toward us—we who know nothing of wholeness
before it is broken.
One spring. One summer.
Five failed surgeries. Twenty-nine titanium screws.
Countless Percocet and Norco.
Five months plus nineteen days of pain.
Two skin grafts. A Fibonacci sequence
of phone calls to insurance agents.
One steel rod. Four metal straps.
Twelve days without leaving his bed.
Six days of refusing to open the curtains
to the sky’s last residue of light
before dusk crushes it to stone.
No warning that endurance
might be the only border between worlds.
Or that a man could heave his destroyed legs
onto a barricade—
could sling himself like a bell rope
over the roof
to let something outside the body
ring.
If circumstance was a clinic of the nonpareil
where the white of night-blooming jasmine and nicotiana
were bandages laid underneath his skin
and the nerves slept finally, dreamlessly into place—
if a day came that he woke, stepping gingerly
into the unfinished hallways that opened out to sea,
waves curled and breaking with their granted power,
that grin loping across his lips again—
then in the face of brevity,
in the beauty of how we must hurry,
could someone please torch the suicide note
taped to his walker on top of the tallest building in town?
Could they turn back the ambulance and its whining lights
driving I-80 too slow? And the railroad tracks
he landed beside, could they touch somewhere
on the horizon, instead of where his name
kickbacked like a gun’s concussion,
knocking me to the clinic’s polished floor?
The dead are born viciously through the living.
And memory, poor lifejacket, drowned
in the most afflicted moments. In one small window,
it was still summer, though suddenly night, the sky swept black.
I woke strangely barefoot inside the grieving room
with its box of coarse tissues and bilingual pamphlets
that warned against the stupid questions
the stupid heart would ask and ask.
I had to gather up my purse, my keys, my sandals
someone had paired outside the door.
Marked in dirt and grime, exact imprints of my weight
pressed against earth. Now past him,
the sound of one foot following another,
the right leading if. The left following then.
Dusk, and I had just left the hospital
and the body that no longer contained him,
when the myriad, black missionaries of sky
circled over the warehouse I’d parked beside
—a dark cloud shattering to obsidian snow
under a sky that flamed and burned,
a bluegrey washing over the horizon,
the pooling murmuration poured into shadows
brushing over concrete walls, the roof,
and it sounded like water
inside the larger music of their countless, weightless
turnings—so many starlings with night
inside and between their wings,
each finely tuned to the velocity of the whole
swarm swept apart, braiding back to one—
as if being was simply made
to be lost and made again, and I wept of course,
for the perfect synchrony of the flock
and its small, forgotten parts,
though I could see each bird had never been
only itself, never closer than now
to the dark astonishment
tucked inside the world he had just been
broken through.
Tonight I picture grief as a commuter
stepping onto the train that rides these tracks,
her small bag packed with power lines
and the dark birds that stiffen there.
Then he takes the window seat beside her,
both of them staring past the winter fields
at last spring
where a county official shot a half dozen coyotes
and left them bundled
along the highway’s shoulder. Further on,
he points out the afternoon
he and I dug a poor grave, the coyotes’ blonde fur
sparking under a blanket of flies and wind.
Always the brightness of it, the March sun,
he muses, and I’m almost certain
that was the same day he told me all light
had narrowly escaped matter’s dark pull.
We were pouring water bottles
over each other’s hands
to wash away the dirt and stink.
A bay gelding walked slowly toward us,
then lifted his enormous muzzle
over the farmer’s electric fence.
I tried to imagine that kind of unlikely grace,
but couldn’t. Think, he said,
of the mathematical possibility of a parallel galaxy,
and then multiply it exponentially
until you arrive back here,
a woman exactly like you standing before a brown horse,
willing to risk a little shock, a little hurt,
just to reach across this halved enormity
and touch.
II
locomotive of the Lord
Netherland
Imagine snow as a celestial orchard in bloom,
mile after mile of pine and granite
clothed in an empire of silence.
There, we burn newspapers, a cord of wood, a bed frame
the squatters before us have left.
Mornings, our boots make tracks
beside the split moons of deer, the clawed prints of bear,
even as wind whittles it all away.
Some afternoons, there is sunlight through the windows
and we lie inside our zipped-together bags
moving like a legless shadow.
Nights, we hear wolves with the sky inside their throats.
No one but your friend knows where we are,
and he has driven us into the Rockies at dark,
saying, “The nearest town is Netherland.”
Meaning, you can’t rescue astonishment
from a boy and girl lost inside the molten light of desire.
Imagine your first love as a road of crumbs
marking a path back to the awakened whole
and your future
as all the small, invisible hungers of this world
devouring the trail.
Post-Surgery Narratives in Triptych
CONJOINED
I woke, legs splayed, my head turbaned and separate, while a tiny room in my chest remembered her blink and breath. Remembered a door ajar to hunger as it slipped between us, and later, a strike of lightning as the doctors broke and broke the cage around my heart to start it up again. Our heart, she’d insist, her thoughts entering mine like rain just before it arrives. Our body.
You would have died without the operation, they argued. Failed zygotic separation, parasitic metabolism. But perched on my skull, the heaviness of her was solace, a burrow fitted perfectly to loneliness. Your body, she hums now into the veins where they untied her. Our soul. There is an intricate translation in her refusal. The way she stands in a field across from the house where we once lived. One lamb is missing, she mutters to the long scar above my ear, her bodiless fingers like wind around a vernal pool touching that line of her darker hair in mine.
GHOST
Today our soul began fingering the unlocked bones of my fontanelle as if trying to remember something about flesh and the strange forms that ripen there. When our soul thinks, I see between invisibles, down to where seepage has extraordinary chambers. When our soul feels, I remember how our mother set my conjoined twin before a mirror and asked, Who is that pretty girl? and my poor sister laid her head down on the rug, weeping. Our soul says it’s hardest for my twin, living half in the fire. That’s why, when my sister sleeps, our soul needs to visit her dream, and so he sets up my dark just the way I like it, and disappears. It’s lonely then, but I try to remember the story of our soul’s ascent: Once upon a time, two doctors and two nurses huddled around us, cutting one head from another, but a soul is the property of infinity, and so I flew above the operating room into the blue neither. Always our soul leaves out the part where he trembles at my bodiless head, bleeding and set aside, and then frantically turns his gaze back and forth between my twin and me. That’s okay, I tell the lingering that our soul leaves. No one can ever make you choose.
SOUL
I left a light on for you, the living twin told me last time I appeared, but her eyes were glassy, elegiac. Poor thing. Each time her mother drags her to a doctor and they entomb her in the MRI, or knock lightly at her knees with a rubber hammer, I am stunned. Tell me, is there a medicine for dying in a surgical dream and waking up dead? And what about beginning with the graft of a driftless ghost? Fact is, a body can be in two places at once, but not a soul. The soul is a point man patrolling countless windows; he sees beyond the chaotic report, the strict and criminal hours, into a ponderous whole. So I can only stand before darkness coming in through two hearts, knowing that is where I should be standing: there and there. Forgive me, but lately I pretend to one that I am visiting the other, and instead fly out to a lost town up the delta. There I move among the late-night fishermen listening to their transistor radios.
In one of Ten Thousand versions
I have a penis and I use it wisely,
holding it out for the swallows
who need to pause between empires
they are building under the bridge,
or as the clumsy brush of a kindergartner
painting the trees
under an extraordinary confusion of stars.
In summer, my penis doubles as ballast and keel
for my kayak bumping down the American river,
egrets lifting off with prehistoric groans.
And speaking of history, I don’t insult my penis
by confusing it with an armored tank
leveling a foreign slum. I don’t holster
or pack heat, don’t whip mongrels
with barbed wire. No my penis is not a larva
feeding on victory, swelling into a packed grenade,
hoarse from shouting at the opposing halfback.
My penis is simply a voice box for desire,
not exactly deaf, but limited in its knowledge
of sign language. It can gesture More. I want more.
It can point like the Rabbi’s long-handled yad
at women made shapely with time—
their gaze shattered by adolescence,
then pieced back together with burden—
because my penis knows loveliness
must be anointed, must be touched
as if it were parchment inscribed
with the delicate shadow of God. Believe me,
there is a science to loving the penis,
and I have studied its vulnerability
before the presence of mystery,
as it quivers like a dowsing stick
before the river of my
wanting and leaps to announce
that I need to be held in the igneous face
of longing, at least that part of me
still willing to catch fire, to burn.
In Another version, I Have a Child with God
A girl this time. He coos and chortles with a joy
that shouldn’t surprise me, having seen Daffodil Hill
and quince orchards blossom in spring.
Still it’s sweet, how the big guy kneels beside her crib,
and then pops up like a newly exploded solar system,
crowing, Peek-a-boo, now you see Me, now you don’t!
Which is how I feel about the night feedings
He promised to share. In fact, with few exceptions,
He’s not much different from my first husband—
His critically important errands
just when the baby’s diapers need changing.
Or how I ask Him for tomatoes and a pint of half-and-half
and He comes back with a bushel of horned melon
and three goats rescued from a cliff in Crete. Honey, I say,
you are hopeless, and He smiles like a meteor shower,
which sets the baby laughing
at all the electromagnetic neutrinos dazzling the walls,
which only amplifies His pleasure,
until sometimes I have to insist He stop
before we all spontaneously combust.
Which He says is impossible, Darling, be rational.
This is where we get into our arguments
about reason and mystery, what with His claims
to have created a universe in a week
when He can’t even fold the laundry before bed.
But despite all the critiques on His cruelty and arrogance,
or the outright lies about His homophobia
and pro-life agendas, you have no idea
how often He cries at night when He thinks I’m asleep,
poring over His species,
weeping for the laughing owl, Cuban holly,
or Xerces, the last blue butterfly.
Just reading the Times, He can take a millennium
over the lists of Iraqi dead, touching each name
as if fingering an original spark blundered into darkness.
at our unmowed lawn, devising good dreams
for the terminally ill. Other times, He watches the baby sleep,
her flawless lips parted in a plump collision,
and shakes His head, whispering, Honey, what was I thinking?
How could I have gotten it so right
and wrong at the same time?
This is when I gather His immensity into my arms
and croon, Shhhhh. What about the pomegranates
with their cathedrals of scarlet? What about the taste of it
and the fire of the actual flaring in a single afternoon
among the aspens? What about a body
meaning everything it cannot say
while all night, wave by wave,
the wild, uncoded sea
quietly unloads its portage of yesterday’s winds?
In a Later version
The Russians and Cubans play soccer in a corn maze.
It’s hard to tell who runs around lost in the rustling,
and who scores a goal, but it is clear there is only one side,
so it doesn’t matter who wins, it’s simply another excuse for happiness
with a great deal of cheering and back-slapping. Best of all,
sitting on a lawn chair among a small crowd of spectators,
I’m still young and pretty. You can tell it in the gaze of men
as I adjust my sundress, though soon it will become
abundantly clear that the allure belongs to my daughter,
at sixteen, and this is her dream stolen from the tweed couch
where she naps, cheeks flushed, lips parted red as cardinals,
her textbooks fallen to the floor, astir in a breeze. And okay,
I am a woman in my fifties, washing dishes
before a window with its dispatches of sky and sunlight,
listening to the faint clank of a schooner
anchored in our cove, its sa
ils battered and beaten into rags,
the neighbor’s son buried on the hills across this bay,
and this his astonished boat
no one can bear to ask his mother to drag back in.
Because everyone knows a parent is mostly animal
and fierce in her accumulation of the beautiful
as it blows apart. And anyone can see how the pages
from my daughter’s history text turn
to one color-plated catastrophe after another—
the sea outside this window necklaced with wind,
its pleats like furrows where the dead could plant a field.
There, between vanishings, it would be enough for them.
In Another Version, I Play Gin Rummy with Satan
Who is surprisingly lame at cheating. Hey, I protest,
as I see him slip apart the cards, though his gaze reminds me
that calling out the King of Hell is a tad ironic. That
and the pelican washed up at water’s edge, its wingspan
stitched and overlaid in brown and white,
as if it was nothing to lay ravage and beauty so close together.
Satan gulps his beer, teeters backward in his chair,
belches like a third-world sewage system.
I keep expecting wind to bring a bad scent of pelican,
but that poor bird is freshly downed, untouched for now
by vultures or maggots, only a couple of blood-red holes
gouged into its body. Holes like gunshots. Like a crime.
This is protected land, a national treasure—Satan laughs,
looking up over his cards, red eyes gleaming, Really?
You want to call in the ranger? You? With your unleashed dog?
Your expired fishing license?
His eternal belly butts up against the table’s edge
like July in the Central Valley with its ripe orbs glowing
under a demonic sun. Still, his acrimony is reassuring,
because anger means a bad hand and sure enough,
Satan mutters Shit! and slaps an ace onto the discard pile.
Which would be great except that suddenly I realize
we never agreed on what’s at stake: world peace,
a second mortgage, one of my kids? Satan swigs his brew
and stares at me impatiently. If only we had shaken hands
before playing, agreed it’s just a game, no one gets hurt.