The Imaginary Doctors
take your hands into their own
raw, rough ones--humbled
by boiling the hospital
linens--red stars bursting
at the nailquicks of nervous
sympathy. They lie down
beside you on the cold tile
floor, by the still waters.
They shepherd your removal
into spacious, newly remodeled
Green Pastures. They take
patient lessons in the lip-sync
of the terminally in terror.
The messages on their machines
sprout wings like the transfigured
hearts in centuries-old emblems
and ascend until the single pyramidical
eye of the doctor blinks them
in.
In the operating theater
they take no bows.
Their silent emissary
bends his young head
as you drive by the window
of the Kwik-View Funeral Parlor.
They bring expensive roses
to the sickroom of your heart,
they come from vast distances,
they pour the milk of space
into pitchers for your bedside table.
And when you are shaking
in the anteroom of the abyss, they,
and not their attendant
choirs, bring warmed blankets
which they tuck around you,
and, like your dead mother,
spit twice, and kiss your forehead.
First appeared in Poetry
International; collected in Ghost
Nurseries (Finishing Line, 2005)
and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths,
2nd edition (Antrim House, 2012).
Minding Desert Places
Winter--4 P.M.
Shadows lay themselves down
on the bare hills, darkly
soft, breast to breast.
Every tree and bush
in the wash—mesquite,
creosote, tamarisk—
is articulate
in its loneliness.
Cholla blink here,
there, guttering out.
Light slides from the warm
rock’s upturned face.
You still see nothing
that is not there,
but now you sense everything
that is.
First appeared in No Place for a Puritan: The
Literature of California’s Deserts, ed. Ruth Nolan
(HeydayBooks, 2009); collected in Shimmer (WordTech
Editions, 2012).
Florence, 88, Naps with Joe, 90
When we lie down together in the light
of half-closed blinds, my fingers glance over
the bruises, like mine, on his right forearm, where
the slightest scratch from a tree or bush in our
yard
turns immediately from an etched white line,
the blood spreading under the skin like red ink
spilled on a blotter, blossoming and blossoming
paper flowers under water. On his left arm,
the bruised skin, bruised again, has grown brittle
scabs,
black as ancient coins in the hold of a wrecked
ship.
He lifts his right arm to enclose me. The flesh
of the underside is melting soft
and very pale, greenish
in the tree-light. His lower leg, black
as seaweed with knotty veins, drifts
over mine, and I swim towards the crook
of his shoulder, as if into a palm-fronded lagoon
and float there, on my back…
Sometimes I drowse into the past
through a backward time exposure
of suns, a croupier’s riffle of golden coins,
lifted and dropped. And I see—
as those who come back from the border
of the undiscovered country say they saw themselves
hovering over their own bodies—my own body
on a beach, bleached white-hot pure
on the inside by desire’s corrosive ache.
The mind is willing—sometimes I remember
so hard, desire’s almost real—but the flesh
is weaker…
Joe breathes like the sea
and his penis stirs on his gaunt
thigh, as if moved
by currents. My reflexive fingers
skim its wrinkled
plush. His body is my adopted
country, known for sixty
years, more familiar
than my own. Outside this cove, I am only
a very old woman—squat
as a hydrant, swollen-ankled,
my face corrugated, and spotted
like an ancient parchment
map—half a lifetime past
the impersonal fury of Joe’s need
when I was raw from birth,
that terror and that pleasure,
half a century past
basking in the hot sun
gaze of men, decades past
accepting the shade.
I shift my head until my ear rests
on his chest. His cool palm
cups my shoulder. Such a privilege
to harbor now, at anchor. Here
I am neither old
nor young. I am
myself, Flo. I rise
and I fall. In the graying
tree-light of our bedroom,
I rock gently
in the hold of his arms.
First appeared in Natural Bridge; collected
in Shimmer (WordTech Editions, 2012).