1. Idiopathic
These rooms never have windows. I’m alone
and waiting, still dressed in the incessant blue
of their gowns. Outside this room, my whole life
swallows hard. My husband paces the waiting
room, flinting his fists. I wait like a cold house
waits for a fire to make it warm, wait while the sky
goes down to an early dusk, mending boundaries
and gaps by failing to reveal them. I wait
because I can’t unfold, can’t rise up
yeasty and sponge-soft, can’t ignore
the ladder I climb every day just to stand
on my own feet. When I hear the tap-tap
on the door, I try to straighten, try to smile, try
to forget the splayed heart flapping in my chest.
Then I listen, nod, murmur my thanks and turn
again toward the ransacked room
of my body.
2. How to Lure the Wolf
Tenderly
the slender bow
of innocence lifts—
nothing unknown
can be known. The hum
of not knowing you’re lucky
in life swells like whole rivers
and flows past the window-
glass, across the field
where he watches you
as those on a long road gaze
at a waiting house, knowing
it’s home. So many future hallways
of blood and bone to prowl
down, your cheeks
so deliciously pale.
In one legend, the wolf fears
the sound of bow on string.
In another,
the rich saw and thrum
resemble his dreams—a mother
who used to sing
“Clementine,” that season of milk
and denning. That you dream
too means nothing
to him, that you sleep curled
and fetal in your bed.
If it were night
and he were hungry, he’ d thrust
his muzzle starward
and howl the pain into your
limbs. But it’s morning. You’re reaching
for pages, shuffling
for just the right song—clean
opening note. Something
andante, no rush. He paws
at the first shoots now breaking
through. His eyes prefer a thicket
for framing, but the window
will do. And the lure
of music. And your unearned body
still so supple,
so blank.
3. Flare
Call it a drum or a slamming
door’s reverberation. Hair spread
on a pillow in red’s not it. Try net
of hot wires lit from within,
a tensing coil, the failing coals
of a just-banked fire, a tree
branching rough through the bones.
Inside a howling roams all my hallways,
a gale of footsteps builds
in my limbs. Call it unwalled
again, estuary bleeding, place of surge
and husks left behind. The meat’s
all-day simmer, a bed never made,
the rains swamping the cellar
for months. The saints all descend
on my barren kitchen, drop stones
in the draining jar of my days.
I dull, I trickle long trails
of pills and needles, jeweled vials,
a river of blood coaxed out
of my veins. Call it thrum
and spinning, rim-bent, warped.
Build it of huddle and pulse,
hunch and vise-grip, a roof
pressing up on a slow-moving storm.
Tell me how to dream a fist
unfurling, the crawl of pain
to some other shore. Tell me
this is worth something—that I’ll burn
a blacker trail along the earth.