Calyx of Held

Calyx of Held

Listen:

While I slept chill sat on the edge

of my bed like hospice

and watched—I feel like she watched

me sweat and pull

the sheets as close as I could

and the quilt too up to the bottom

of my mouth just below

enough of the nose so I wouldn’t go

                                (too late now)

into full on sleep.  She’s been

sitting there for years, once

I remember seeing her silhouette

against the window when I was feverish

with measles and she was enough

of the dark that I couldn’t tell

if she was real or if I’d made her

up lonely as I was in that room

weeks on weeks by myself

in the dark.  Times I couldn’t shiver

enough to get warm and I thought

if the dog were allowed in the house

he’d lay at my heals and deliver

like mercury rising

his the heat of his beating blood into me

and I’d never

be cold again.  That’s the irony

of 105 degrees: peaks of mountains

and the sweet descent

all that hot breath and fog on the

goggle lens and isn’t it

the sweat I mean

cold as snow beneath snow beneath

snow the frozen weight of it

and if standing too long at the top

in the wrong boots

like that dog’s heat the freeze

will come in at the feet

and bend at the knew and not

so much retreat as seek an edge to be

the core, like in an apple say, and only

if it’s cut between the stem and the sepal

the dying end, the cold

eye exposed to the world first

enlarging the flesh behind it

but quietly like, and how close

to the cold I am a lot, slow

but (because I’ve got a lot

of nerve) holding on.