Hip Check
Art gallery in winter: my son taps my arm
in warning. Before I believe I see
the wasps circling the window’s blue
heat. When one lights on my wrist softly
my mind fails — an easy rush of wild trust
that cold will protect me, simply alter
my chemistry as an artist’s hand sweeps
over charcoal, turning slashes to shadows
wrapping a curved figure. Some gold afternoons
I fear this falter was a portent of my mind to come:
logic lost or pliable, no vigilance enough
to save memory. In the gallery etchings tremble
and I am reckless, marshaling a round breath
to blow the wasp away — but steadfast it sways,
the moving metal of its carapace scraping
a bracelet’s bezel over my skin. I am recalled
to myself: don’t gasp, don’t scream. To the wasp
I’m merely warm, unsweet. No one wants a scene —
Winter, thronged halls: a boy, a hockey player,
on the way to choir likes to take my hand.
Laughing, he aims and with his hip, slams
me into the lockers. No one else remembers
how, every time, the bruise rose blue: a target,
a boy’s rough sketch of a girl’s breast.
* * * * *
Convent
These are the sisters who stay home with God
and listen. Their walls are cream and gray and green,
and every corner is clean and quiet. Because anyone
could be a saint in the making, someone believes
I could belong here, like the oak furniture built to outlive
this century and the next. Like the nun I follow, I too
could wear sensible shoes, give brief tours to bookish girls —
girls who memorize saints’ attributes and patronages,
their histories of violence and illness, girls who try not
to ruminate over their tormented bodies never rotting,
girls who hunger for a glimpse of the little gilded houses built
to rest their relics — queer girls who will never pray here.
I want to ask her, this nun, this complexity dressed
in simple clothes, why she lives with a man I suspect
is never there, or is there but never speaks. I wish I could ask
if she’s ever wanted to leave her careful sisters who tend
the garden, clean the kitchen, try to mend the torn world
with their hours and prayers, if she wants to step out now
through the unguarded door, go down the gateless drive,
take just an hour’s walk along the boulevard lined
with Tudor mansions and broad lawns that would bring
her to the people she trusts to the care of her god and the city
they fill with their breath and their noise and their desires
and their injustices, to the Rapid stop and Severance Hall,
then the many-windowed library, paintings cool and safe
in the museum, and to the botanical garden, where someone
has arranged the sunlight just so over cacti and papaya trees,
over palms and the epiphytes that rely on their strong bodies
as they reach into space that welcomes them, as they imagine
they need only air to live.