Poetry |

“Nocturne with Shaved Head”

Nocturne with Shaved Head

 

Now it’s like great bolts of silk are being unfurled in the sky.

Occasional handfuls of pins tossed at the glass. Brocade

of the dark, kimono cloth, hypnagogic waves. The rise and fall

of my husband’s chest, his head shorn today by the barber so it reveals

his scalp, what the finest bristle permits. They say the head weighs

about eleven pounds, the size of the baby he was at birth.

His mother never failed to note he could have killed her, but she survived

and had another even bigger one. I learned tonight you shouldn’t

dig a grave on a Monday unless you want to dig another one

within the year. Also, when a slit in the throat reveals the carotid artery,

it looks like calamari. This in a documentary intended to help us

understand death. A man agreed in advance to let us see

how chemicals restore the blush to his face. That’s him, the undertaker said,

fixing the glasses over his nose. Sometimes while my husband sleeps

I can almost make myself feel the baby he was, being lifted

to a hip, his brow pressed against the soft of my throat.

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