The Monitor
Thursday and the city’s
only sound the promise
of illness, its galloping heart.
The after-rain quiet
just collateral.
Over Doppler, its beat might rhyme
with the fetal one that echoes from
the exam room down the hall.
Suction makes a seal,
releases: sterile kiss.
Obsessed, like all valves,
with opening and closing,
both might map their growing
spheres of influence, capacity
for independence:
abdomen, bladder. Wriggle
the fingers and toes. Fill
one lung, then the other
with a practice breath.
Front doors keep our faith in closed
circuits. Oh, just this familiar air
coming around again, the lungs’
sung refrain, the skin’s
invisible friends.
In the waiting room, pregnant women
hover inside envelopes of
somebody’s absence. Inside houses,
people Google who
will deliver to me now?
* * * * *
Dust
Confined in the house of my body, I begin
to notice dust — fine snow over
piano keys, crumbs of plaster swirled
in doorways. Gatherings of the never-
anymore-touched.
A barely visible congregation
assembled to worship the deity of
time gone by without
bends prostrate in
the thickening dusk, not to be confused
with dust, though both emerge
at the ends of things; both find safety
in abandonment.
Only in the sun that fills
the eastern window after washing,
at an hour by which in freer times
we’re usually threaded along
the seams of our days –
(however will we make,
we wonder, this room dark enough
for baby) —
only there can I trace
the patterns on the laminate,
where I with a brush, half-hearted, on some
Tuesdays, have tried to disperse
the crowd. As if just by jangling
my bones like keys
I could force the shamash to crack the door,
cancel the endless, voiceless sermon,
banish the stillness that choruses
in every unswept corner, composing
melodies of a single note, held until
the breath gives out.
* * * * *
Bottle Green
Day eighteen and the copper face on the floor at dawn
says east, west
You’ve gone downstairs early. I pluck the parts of my body
that tighten with blood; they make
a tense music. Dream says: try not to banish the wave
at its gentle crest, try
to slip your head under its emerald kindness, emerge
slick and crusted
with tiny crystals. Or let it buoy you, collect your limbs
like rags from the factory floor,
set you down on its loose bed.
Oh for the summers
we dozens dotted the shoreline, daring a little further
into the ocean’s unmappable
color, once called bottle-green, now reflecting no vessel
it swallows or gives up. But we
were green then, bits of rough-edged glass, broken
on the bias.
Fathers and daughters, teenage sons, swimmers lapping
steadily against
the purr of speedboats. Waiting in our loneliness
to be lifted from the earth,
to be desired by the stoic moon. For the will of salt
to polish us
until some evening, late, the boardwalk lights
extinguished, we might glint
with pricelessness, condition made of never being
bought or sold.