Ever

 

EVER ~

 

He who would search for pearls must dive below.

                                    John Dryden

 

Ever had a pain so deep

in between the private places

right where the left & right side

join? It makes me

think this is how stretched skin

feels, a new velum waiting to feel

paint.  I feel it, feel it fearful,

feel it being so new the ache

doesn’t know where to center

itself so it rests there where the ribs

 

meet each other & now that

they’re there they will never cease being

unseparated.  Consider this:

twins who in utero

& unbeknownst to their mother

form a pact and are born

keeping that pact intact sharing the one

kidney or lung or the one

unamputatable organ

 

beneath the bone housing.

All those molecules no one

can know & not only molecules

but elements & the underneath

of flesh so intimate a place

even the surgeon, pealing it

 

away to make one finally into two

stops utterly, catches a sob

and doesn’t know how

the incision should begin

or for that matter how

on earth she’ll be able

to go on once the cut begins. 

Interpreting Mercury

 

 Interpreting Mercury  

 

It may be only the crudest, cruelest transformations touch us,

gauzewalkers in the hallways of a burn ward.

 

                                    Christian Wiman

                                    Assembly

 

Somehow where to pick up the thread

alludes me like the mercury it is, poison silver

drops falling from the bitten

through thermometer between her teeth.

 

It happened.  She had a fever & she needed

to see the heat registered, read it

as a divination.  Beneath the glass the line

rises while the tube is under her

 

tongue, her conniving ally.  Removing it

through the kiss of her lips makes a new

wound, though a ghost, and going cold

where it used to measure the heat of her.

 

It was never wrong.

 

Once, she taught me to shake it down

to normal, to rinse off the bits of her, to stash

it in the medicine cabinet in its protective

plastic scabbard I misnomed Excalibur

 

because I was gorging myself on boys

in books (my only intimacy my virginity)

and one in particular who could call down God

while raising up the blade he’d slid easily out of

 

the rock it was fixed in.  I don’t think these

things while she sat  on the lid

of the toilet and scrubbed

the crust of sick from her wrist to

 

her elbow.  I think instead I thinks she said

she thinks she has

a fever.  She said let me see.  She saw.

She said

make sure to shake it down & she shrugged

her stiff/limp wrist wet with wash-

cloth.  And all its contents

flung.  The door was shut.  She had a cut

 

above her eye where she’d fallen

up the stairs.  She pressed the back of my hand

to her

cheek & bleeding brow.  Squeezed. 

 

                             Squeezed 

                             hard.  She bit down.

 

She was twenty

two when I was born. The day I read

her temperature I was nine.  We conspired

like thieves above a dug hole.  I shouldered her

 

to bed shhhhhshhhhhhshhhhh 

she’d said.  The shard

& shattered tube of glass, the tiny pool

of cooling mercury estimated me,

and it suffered nothing, apt bead 

reading the heat 

or the lack of it

either way.