Please,
For
cousins wade, theresa
Never know the morning a new
Ache in the place where the old
Injury has made its tight residence
Insist itself for itself alone never giving
Up the ghost but only going relict,
Relic. It’s mouth
& hands small as a
Wren. When it wakes
it sings – it per-
Ches on the claimed ligament and
Opens its throat.
Somehow the hutch
Doesn’t go cold, even after all
These years.
Perpetual, the clutch
Of the eggs is the transformation of
Yolks into eyes, albumens into feathers
Tails & breasts & wings. Semi-matured, it
Quakes on the edge of its first
Flight, the perch patient as any
Nesting abandoned.
See the muscle
Shake awake, flinching in the pinch of
Being. It is here we
want to widow our children
Selves, abandon them
On the lane half-way up to the house
That bore and beat them, tore their
Throat and gizzard & sent them songless
Out on the dawn.
Or never know how yesterday my cousin
Pulled over on the side of the road, a little
Gas station, a little break, having driven
From North Carolina to Louisiana to save
Her brother’s life.
And she did too. Pulled
Him out of his coma with the strength of her
Permission & the swelling in his brain
Began to wane. He
woke, being weened, & she
Stayed long enough to set him on his course,
To hug her other brothers & sisters & plug her
Course home.
Exhausted but staying the way,
It was nothing but a straight shot & work
The next day. Pulled
to the rest
Stop something in her went slack. At the pump?
In line to pay?
Filling her mug of coffee? She
Keeled over & later they’d say she was probably
Dead before she met the floor, though they
Also said she coded three times, & under the paddles
Seemed to rally. That
ache. The one
One wakes with. The
one one doesn’t want
To recognize or make way for, give a curt
Nod, a lowered lid to its dominance, a bend
Of the knee, the way a bird taking to her
Sky might bend, the start in their heart
Being what gets them airborne, into the shadow
That layered across its face & made them take up
To the clouds.