slightly shy

The delicious vaccine comes to you
and watches how your cells touch,
nudging against each other
like women knitting
in murmured conversation.

Your mother told you
“Listen to me. Don’t get married.
This is what it feels
like to die.” The darkness of her body,
the light from the closet
splashing across her wet
cheekbones. You were eight.

The celerity of this immunity, spreading
like a muted splay of churchbells
across an empty English scene
of country. No one here is astonished.

The delicious vaccine readies you
to be frozen as makes you transparent.
Now your cells are quietly moving,
as if lit from the inside. They are figures
in a snow covered house
seen from a distance, and the silence of the fields
ten minutes before it gets dark.

When my body and your body
Lie together under a white sheet
Your head on my arm
Your leg thrown over my leg
The whole long continent of you
The pale ridgeline of your ribcage and hip and thigh
Neighbor to me
There is nothing that needs to be explained
Or accomplished, the world is at rest and complete
And though
We drift apart in the eddies of the day
We will find our way back
To the slight hollows that mark the place
Where we lie now, astonished, saying nothing.

by Garrison Keillor

garfield poem

You guys remember when I said that all of my poems were going to be about Garfield? Here is the beginning of the end.

*  *  *  *  *

Beginning this morning, Garfield the cat
is on a diet, and last week he bought himself
a book by Camus.

“I’m tired of being a schmuck,” he says.
He has bought an Eric Satie album
to which he listens intently
during the long, empty afternoons. Secretly,
he is considering a beret.

After a month, Jon asks him
“How do I look?” and Garfield says
“Maybe it doesn’t matter if this girl likes you
or not. Maybe you should call your Dad.”
“Since when does a cat smoke cigarettes” says Jon.
“If life is worth living,” says Garfield
“you should take off that bowtie.”

Now, Garfield is sitting in the window,
watching Odie in the yard. He wonders
if Odie has ever felt heartbreak. What gold in his fur
in the afternoon light, but what does it mean?
Garfield barely even wants to kick him
any more.

Garfield has stopped keeping track of Mondays,
and has decided against the beret. Jon has made him
another appointment with the vet. Garfield is resigned. “This life”
he says “is ridiculous. If this is a joke,
it’s getting old.”

But still,  the days stack on each other. The vet doesn’t call
Jon back, and Garfield is reading
Wallace Stevens. Jon talks to himself,  and Odie, living in a four second bubble, sustains countless injuries,
but  Garfield says little,
appreciating the cadence of the days, and observing the loneliness
of our orbits. it is impossible to tell
if the joke is winding down. Garfield watches
the moon as he sits on the backyard
fence. He has stopped  looking for the end.

I.

There has been talk of lice at the school this week
and Nora’s mother has asked
that I keep her hair tied back.
Nora hunts for the green plastic brush
and asks for braids.

How familiar, this task, and this sense
of an echoing joke,
free, lost, without audience.

II.

My hair is short now, and yet
I am a woman
braiding a child’s hair.

Nora asks How do you know
how to do this
and I say
I know a lot of things.

What I know
is that there is a mother
who will hurt you

but what light
in Nora’s hair
through the morning window

III.

The restive child
does not remember her birth,
and the mother only remembers
the pain of being torn
by something she can’t stop.

What I remember
is the  night before Easter, coming home
alone, without hair,
my mother in the hallway weeping
You Can’t Come Home Any More.




IV.

Nora’s mother has made
her tea, and asks
if I would like any.

We all burn our lips
with that first unguarded sip.

When Nora asks
what my family did
for Christmas, I say
Drink up sweetheart. We don’t want to be late.

My lip hurts, she says.
I’m sorry, says her mother

It’s nothing, I say. We are already gone.

.


the kiss of a skeleton to the skin
in the warmth of muscles,the muscles
murming in the darkness
about the dark
.

finger tip to finger tip
that is how they speak, not refraining
from their long, meaningless anecdote

.

the love of a body
for itself; the body
loving nothing but itself

.
Asleep in its dream
of  millions of cells
glowing, like lights in the tall factory
in the heart of night’s city

.

performing a small, lucid business
in the silence of God

.

.

I do not know where my mother bought
the cow’s heart.
I was there

beside the table when she unwrapped it,
the crisp butcher’s paper silent,
wet with blood. Squirrel-eyed,

my older brother held it in his palms
like the Hope diamond.
Surgical gloves drooping like ghosts
on his small hands.

This Is Like Your Heart, my mother said
holding my hands over the white paper plate
edged with shell shadows, her fingers
bruising my wrist. I shut my eyes
and winced, the cow’s heart
like a soaked sponge, my arms
straight out.

Don’t You Want To Know
How The Heart Works? asked
my brother. There were
a million galaxies behind
my eyes. I did not.

.