from We Will Take Any Mother
I.
time is a fold in my body along the edge of blue shale in my terraced Ohio
my mother and I are suspended two hundred twelve feet above ground
on a bridge where parallel to us mere feet away a second bridge
is swaying the multiplex below Metro-parks below the valley below
is real there is nothing comforting about it smearing
gradients I see in the distance are a mechanism of the coast this rare
Midwestern fog now scattering and opposing the light
the tree canopy like waves at low tide
next what looks like Sutro Tower changing
in angle of incidence on my left but on the right there is another Sutro
despite my mother my passenger the succulence and the slope
this is San Francisco and I am alone with feral
rosemary bushes in the devil strip wafting up
dense and slow I can’t even hear her voice
V.
a series is real the face does distort this contrapuntal body
muscles under the surface pulling in opposite directions darker
and lighter areas like a social studies diagram illustrating the schema
of mesa cavern and town
it is not a real place you know a collection of features
but no real occurrence like my face closed down when I am not
looking at you I make my face a blind I hide all
my guns get back to your mother as a child grabs hold
the soft of mother’s upper arm “near” and not “in”
maps should not be conflated object permanence is the first mother hidden
in her own hands peek at the mother now lost in a field of—
this is how the landmark works hands you know pulled back
to reveal the familiar face you have forgotten admit it
IX.
dolls are a kind of practice making them speak washing their plastic bodies
by now I recognize the numbness that comes upon me in sleep
as I sit next to the mother not speaking also by touch
I keep Sutro to myself like a small midnight
hour I learned from the other dolls seven sisters show
there are seven ways to hold the breath my mother wakes from her morphine sleep
in J 3-3 asking what next this is the warp of day her shock her sterile room
just another white box on earth where she repeats
the horror of waking several
times when the full light hits day is a long labor
across a landscape that is not still even once
the day we are reaching for throws us
down the next sloping drive I would like you to know now
the proper word for this is not shock
a pilgrimage tamps you down makes you lie
flat you follow something I ’d call fear trying to scan the darkness
for color beneath the red black find the bluer black
beneath sea-foam green and its black that is breaking up
black like a swift exhalation black that exceeds the bound
Code
glass took on a milky feeling we’ll call frost in room J 8-2
among matte tile-work the curve of the hall made me feel
a certain diameter on the monitor sound
had been turned off but a deformity in time
took place on screen whenever my mother moved an inch
I froze the computer lit a green box around this called it
an artifact artifacts were pretty no one ran to the room
in J 8-2 my mother’s body was an unbuttoning
surgical scars like topographical notations leading you
to the river where you will dunk your body seven times
where you will cry out with gratitude to be healed the pattern
on her gown was also beyond comprehension a contagious
chaos like all her data a shape you could see
but not read if at all times I didn’t think of her I was formless
this was also a kind of death I could hear a code called anywhere
in this building I could feel the night
nurse at her desk couldn’t feel the day
when a man died on the transplant floor and his light
flashing code blue J 8-12 code blue J 8-12
then wailing from a woman just ahead
obscured by the curve I was the dark
moving down the sea-green hall on this ward
I was becoming tectonic
Cut
When the home-aid nurse comes
to check on my mother’s drainage tube
I am sharpening my knives
with my new Bavarian edge.
When I hear the nurse say proximity
to the toxin, I entertain the thought
that disease might be seen
as a measure of intimacy.
A knife is my favorite kitchen helper.
Come a little closer.
Look here at what is
wanting near. Nurse and I both
in our power play
where any vision of safety
that suggests we could terrify
or outrun an illness undoes us.
Every Verb Is a Lesson
in Longing or Dread
my mother can speed through the constellation
of her lungs in her online results: the patient-customer
can carry her own film through the corridors
because another pair of eyes on the data field
is always helpful, like the divers clouds of notation
above the jagged range of my mother’s EKG
her community of caretakers also dot about the city
aunts and church mothers, across municipalities
form a recombinant purple feeling
one mother is a clear airway of articulation
before the rasp in the throat
she is the high C5 lifting
one mother is a sure eye, a locked
door, the astringent sting
one mother is the clear
agenda of the body, the gauze, the warp
one mother is the lymph, the system-keeper
the catalyst that propels our offensive
one is the dream of health my mother forgets
upon waking, the prayers of one mother
are the metal plates they rebuilt her with
rod that holds the bone, then the finest
black stitches we use to chastise
and fool the body
upon discharge, the physician reads
the litany of prescriptions and dosage
there is the beating fold in J 2-3
of the esophagus, the breath, diaphragm
in its stretch and tensile strength
for my mother, we are the human mic
we are the composite body
that amplifies the message in the call
and response style of the labor rally
mic check: my muscles cramp uncontrollably
mic check: I can’t keep any thing
down, we repeat the pain
my mother enumerates, we flood
her patient experience with a scatter
of light as if all the doctor has to do is land
After Vermont, My Hipster Hunter’s Cap
after a line by Lucille Clifton
is stockinet in a color
that means someone is trying to kill me,
even when indoors. In the city,
no bears for such hunters,
but there are guns. Lucille knows,
despite the odic expression,
stinking amygdala in a skull
cap that cuts
across my head, exposing
my nape. This is how
close. I can come to
bleeding without a scratch.
Orange licking the radium
dial. Hands all up
in the shade as a battering
imposition a loud cackle
the trickster kinship
between the other-world
and the unaccountable.
Between nickel azo red gold,
and burnt sienna. It is not
this column of flesh
holds the warmth.
I maintain no argument
as regards the landing strip
of my body that I could distinguish.
Lit up beneath the convex
flowering foliage at my face.
That I am laid down in the black
color of my crew
neck is something I watch
me submit to. This tee
crawling up my neck
is my home
animal, but anything so neon
covers my embarrassment
with my embarrassment.
While some colors beat
our spectrum, I get all indignant.
My head is the flag I raise.
from Test
You see everything as formless and you forget
that this is a sign of life.
—Hilma af Klimt
Nearness is owed me
There is a sea of red
Lights suspended fifteen feet
Above the tarmac
Something bad
Is beating about the color
Taken, as in carried
Away. Taken in transgression
The left face of the form
And the right, running
Into one another like
Stress waves in solids
My body is a heartbreak
I clock away from
The wrong hills
And valleys jumble
Lines broken like
When you can’t read
The harm in my tone
I can pull you
Across the tarmac
In my fury, fervor
I am roving over the lots
Metal stakes in the frozen
Ground, tufts of brown grass
Ice pilings, I follow
The pattern
Out of my hands—
Large wings unbending
Go up with a start
+
I woke up angry
In my dream
At the shore, her blood
Washed around like a weak tide
A sine/cosine of my own
Interference. I am
The cold forming the ice
My body runs this
Show like the unseen edge
Of an electromagnetic field
The luminescent cast at my wrist
Was a thin screen I read through
I wanted to beat and course
Where I stood, the pressure
In my face was a ten
Even miles away
That raggedy mass hung together
I was trying to leave
While my friend on the lakefront
Was dying of pancreatic cancer
I ’d starve at the light field, waiting
For a question. Creatinine 3.1
Creatinine 1.9 Creatinine 2.4
Certain 4.3. A god
Of monsters, minus one
Point. To lose composure
Stranded on a darkening
shore. This is a kind of loving
