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.
