your mouth scraped clean of mud, his gun still cold.
Afterwards in the snowblue light of November,
there was a list, numbered, but not yet filled in.
The nurse apologized before asking you to undress,
her hands smelling of someone else’s hurt and soap.
The list went on like anything wanting to be healed:
all that green-gold light after rain,
compressed sweetness in a little rip of time,
your daughter gluing a tiny fence around her model
of the Santa Inez mission, truth backlit by harm.
Still there was an argument you could not enter
without sitting inside the miniature chapel
on benches made from toothpicks, windows wrapped in plastic.
On one side it was winter, wind raking a frozen river,
and you, sealed into an elegant nullity.
On the other, you stood riverside, gasping
at two humpback whales circling the Port of Sacramento,
the delicate anchor of a new child
asleep in your arms,
those barnacled, blade-scarred bodies
breaching like the paired lungs of God.
And by argument, you mean the atonal, the dissonant,
the ways you break to this inelegance and need,
screaming, I’m starving, help me, help me!,
the wind outside your windows
whipped into a firmament,
a fiery snow of leaves driven down.
Surely there is something more than endurance
to believe in, something more sanctified
than a child throwing his hard skull
into your chest, something larger than one body
soothing another
until his terror slows and he laps milk from a bowl
underneath your desk. Months later
his grandmother will tell you how she found him
in a trailer, covered in his mother’s blood.
Awake and mute in the dead woman’s arms.
You want so much to say God bless you,
and know what the hell it means.
Even now, trash plowed into gutters,
you walk past a grape arbor alive with sound,
and except for a yellow flash, a wincing shadow,
the moment’s aria is invisible, the choral exultation
scattershot and winged.
Finally, there are entire moments
blue and salted among the leaves,
the poppies blaring face up
like emboldened cardinals,
and forget you are evicted,
your cottage empty as this rowboat
chained to a single, sunken weight,
the bleached dock kneeling as it drowns.
Say your life is a closed circle
where a dirge bobs in waves,
cormorants batting their wings
against the forgiving chord of water.
Say mercy,
but mean erasure takes you tenderly apart.
This afternoon when you arrived,
a crowd of children dragged rubber boats
in and out of the bay, laughing.
A shirtless toddler sat on sand, licking her shovel.
Pointed to the jellyfish
that pulsed like an understory of halos.
Soon ash will be snowing down,
vagrants burning the floorboards
and closet doors. Say nothing,
Or say that repetition
and its elixir of details
belongs to salvation,
while the next world comes to you
inside of this one, inexplicable
and strange. August,
the bay is a sky of ghosts.
Moonjellies, one brother tells another,
and holding hands,
they wade out with pails.
NOTES
“St. Augustine, Florida”—for D.P.
“All Night You Ask the Children of the World to Forgive You”—the title is
taken from a line by Robert Dana in his poem “Written in Winter.”
“Garden Party as the Prow of a Small Ship Traveling”—for Djina.
“Variations on Rupture and Repair: Horse”—in gratitude to Annemarie Flynn,
and to Dan Bellm’s poem “The Weight.”
“Interlude”—for Nancy.