Ten Years On

Ten Years On

why will it not work what magic

word made it work

                                                Lincoln in the Bardo

not what shocks me because doesn’t that

change every day like first it’s a run up

the road-bone bone to bone

of my spine after starting grounded

at the toe at the hospital door?  whatever it is

I am I sniff it sizzle and I yellow a one second 

coward take to root glue to be the rigid thick skin

of the spruce I pass on a walk most days

or maybe maybe her bole bulging now

all these years I’ve known her (is it

painful that bole?) or maybe a me

between that bole her root and trunk and tap

root and canopy or maybe I tip my face to

the ceiling of her low sky like how 

my mother, dying

for the last time licked hers while the final husk

of her self a hollowed woman of flacid

muscle and dumb tongue intubated for all those

last days all seventeen nearly three

weeks of those days all the water in her

skin pulled in as if—well it was the valley—

her lips cracked caked it was all around

the tube seeming to suture her mouth

while she in and out in and out was being

breathed not breathing do we know anything

anything at all other than watching

looking off watching looking off