Please,

 

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.