The Dr. Said
I didn’t notice that I kept on taking
the drugs long after the pain became
manageable, Dr.’s words;
I was happy every night, lying on my back
in a bed in a house that wasn’t mine
because my split skin would open up
if I rolled over on my side. I took
the pills, and if I got to rocking seasick
I’d eat at least a Saltine, Dr.’s words;
and I lay back and guzzled water and
I was happy. I was happy. I
shook all over, like shock, like I could
vibrate right out of my skin through
the new incisions, through the scabs,
and make the world mine. I
shook, I said to the Dr.,
and shook until I brought the Saltines
back up to drop in the toilet
and the filmy bile that was the drug,
and I don’t know when I knew, but it was
probably when I said to the Dr.
no one could be so happy and so sick.
The little pills rattled out of the bottle and
sunk to the u-bend. I thought they must
dissolve, but I stared at them for a long time
wondering if I wanted them back, and they
never liquefied. They lay, those living rocks,
white against white, at the bottom of a shallow
lake I could still reach through, hands wet, pills wet but I
I could have them still, they said.
I still regret now and then how I let them
flush away, like the Dr. said
Reader orbits reader, one on the fringe of the other’s gravitational pull, neither body exerting pressure on the other beyond the gentle tug of a sleeping moon on black seawater. I like this time with you, dear. I’m off on my own adventure, perilous and strange, but there you are, overlaid on the empty desert rock in my pages, my beloved ghostly totem. We live our lives this way, I think; I go to work and you go to work somewhere else, and we run different errands at different times and our friends in their separate constellations interact and react and collide, and on the bus this morning you ran into a beggar while I was ready to hit the parking-garage ticket lady over the head with her stupid bar, and I ate lunch but you forgot and your coworker brought you coffee — all day we are separate, following our different orbits, but at the back of my mind there’s always the quiet pull of home and our books and you.
While Skating I
The day snaps the tails of my winter coat,
whoops sharp between brittle birch branches,
dervishes down again to skate with me, drives
stinging sugar-dust in loops and whorls
across the blinding burnished silver ice.
Against white silence, the blades of my skates
scrape and scratch the diamond skin of the lake
until the bone-deep crack of the ice
ricochets off snow-dunes and snow-fields
and I am under, in the dim murky black
and the cold begins to burn and my lungs convulse,
drawing black ice, and I thrash and I fight
my way back to the grey of the day I hope is up —
USS Little Rock
I lie here on the naked bunk,
stained and narrow, of a sailor
who may now be alive or dead.
I stare up at the rusted coils
lashing the upper bunk in place,
as he must have done sometimes,
and listen to the dull, hollow
churn of giant engines below me
in the dark, vibrating through
bulkheads and down corridors,
and fill my head with thoughts
of him, who called this home,
and what kind of life he lived
between metal walls and
in cramped metal cubbies
in service of a sweet dream.
pre-dawn
In the night I lie awake,
fearing to myself
(am I wrong?
am I broken?
can I change?)
and the headlights in the street
chase crooked shadows up the wall
and by turns both fall on
half-white canvas, on brushes
in the mason jar, on
the rigid spines of my
poor, enduring books,
and I listen to the hush
of a single passing car
that free man
that never-been-a-passenger
in his life, and finally I myself
am chained to the wall
by headlight and by shadow,
and I listen to the clank
and I fear both my strength
and my fatal flaw.
Mushrooms
The old wives whisper
by each cradle, kind eyes
flashing in the firelight:
dare to cross the fairy ring
and lose an eye or die or
be swept off to fairy realms,
or, worse, be forced to dance
around and round and round,
unable to escape. But me, I think
I’m in the fairy ring, around
and going round for all eternity.
I think perhaps that troupe of
moon-white princelings twirling
hand in hand and toe by toe
in this grove of twilit dream
might just be the portal out.
No Trail is a Place
The trail is in the pack, coiled tight
with paracord and the island map
in its plastic gallon bag. It jostles up
against the soda-can stove and gas,
is cushioned by the old wool socks,
grows warm against your back.
The trail scrubs your heels to blisters,
clenches in your calves with every
long heave up over a boulder and every single
drop, throws each breath you stop to catch.
The trail is the sun-soaked silent wild beyond the next naked ridge of rock
and the copse of lichen-coated pines
who drip their needles in a pungent rug,
the trail is the ginger step of a shadow fox
in the grey false dawn through camp,
and the loons on the lake that rock your
hammock with a lush goodnight lament.