from V
Relic
V’s idea of order is this: Zero in the center and the numbers
fan out. The numbers fan out through the grid. From the plane,
V saw vast squares of corn quilt the flatlands. Then, the ghost
of an onion-skin sheet floated over the city, graphing the path
between parish and home. Zero is the center, and the streets fan
out. V has been to Florida, sinking in the sea. To Rome, to bridges
Golden and Brooklyn, scraping paint from both into her purse.
At home, she would tweezer the little flakes into her palm
and steady the magnifying glass over them to look for what makes
them greater, but she only stole them to show that she, V, had moved
beyond the reach of the grid, over the planet, to stand in another place.
* * *
Pool
V cycles the standing bike twelve hundred seconds a day. One
and one half cups of coffee with two tablespoons of half cream.
This is how V gets to the end. I am going outside to get the paper,
V tells V, pulling her blue robe around her like a bat. The paper,
in plastic against the rain, is under the bushes again. V tells V
she should call and complain. If she begins a novena today,
November will be over by the end. After her first eleven years,
V hit her head in the pool. She wishes you could pick which hours
would be your lost hours. I want to wake up the next day, thinks V.
The next day, when she woke, she couldn’t remember. By the time
V knew again where she was, her head didn’t hurt anymore.
* * *
Rush
With the comfort of fighting the little illness in the midst of
fighting the large, V loses her voice. She would say it was painless
if she could speak. She croaks into the phone that there is a coupon
in the paper she means to cut out, to carry to a store to buy a print
blouse in a Large. It is sheer to be cool but to cover her elbows,
the patches that give her away. It would be easier to tell you
in person. She won’t be going to the opera. She wants to see the opera.
She doesn’t want to get to the opera. She will listen to the opera
on the radio in the kitchen. If, during the opera, someone comes
to the door offering to shovel the snow, she will let them shovel
the snow. Or after the opera, she will shovel the snow.
* * *
Salt
V is reheating a piece of the roast she cooked for the lunch
yesterday. A man passes outside the window, three feet
from where she stands, walking a dog the color of the side-
walk, an invisible dog, the clicks and panting phantoms.
They all stare into an empty distance, the dog, the man,
and V. He had passed one day when V stood in the frame
ironing a suit in which to bury — in which to bury — There is
a dangerous space between earth and afterlife, and V will not
look at a man who looked in at her as she stood at the ironing
board in the middle of a smoke-yellowed fury and horror
despair how could he why did he then the microwave dinged.