When she arrived
she felt composed. Someone called her. The voice broke,
trying to bridge or to remember. The voice that called
was no other than her own.
*
Did they take a vein from her thigh to mend her heart?
She pulled a pant leg up. Her face, undressed, was more interesting.
She was grinning. How old do you think I am?
Still she wanted to die. And there, her reflection
facing her. It motioned as if she were alive.
Her photo was in her purse.
*
For nostalgia: the Ferris wheel turns.
No one rides it.
It brought her to tears. She was recalling.
She put the drink down. She went into the bathroom. The toilet
never flushed.
*
Da daa daa. She repeated,
Da daa daa. She wanted to leave.
I got a lot of life for a dead woman.
She laughed. She was laughing. She was lying. The rain.
Here. Take the photo. In the photo she is not gorgeous.
She is not ugly. She is in the photo only.
In the photo the Ferris wheel does not turn.
In the photo she is alive.
I was alive. Did I say this? I asked. I stood up. The rain.
Before the arrival of everyone, drinking glass after glass,
she had to excuse herself eventually, not that
the bougainvillea moved or that the neighbors stood still,
but because he would see through her and say,
You won’t be liked tomorrow. All across the mountains
trees like matted hair took everything in. There they were
in what developed: that place discouraged.
He could be sweeping the grass, so ruined his smile.
She sprinkled salt on her lime. In the window
his gritty glance making the clouds move, loosening
the configuration of a volcano into a sleeping woman:
her hard lines dimmed by unclaimed rain. More expansively,
the sky is blue. This in time reminds. Stands one up.
Laughter has the house to itself. It wraps to hide
expectation elsewhere. Laughter has the house to itself.
It swings from ear to ear until her eyes squint,
wrinkle wicked, against a flood of salted years.
The trouble: hers is, she has
no imagination for the future.
When she lies face down on the much-praised wood floor
she considers her face a ceiling. The trouble:
hers is, she has no image of the future.
Though if we turn the corpse face up in the coffin
the lid remains the floor in face of such distance. Tell her,
she can’t rest there. Though she thinks herself a fish shored,
laughter sputtering against the unwept,
ever peaceful. Tell her, she cannot rest there.
Within the untrained ear
laughter sounds like sobbing because breath catches
in the throat, then spurts out.
When he was in the house, he would ask
(blue tones) he would ask, “What’s so funny?”
He knew her secret (but could not know)
and felt random in the face of—
When he was in the house
for him her face was not the ceiling; the ceiling
was the ceiling. He chose that. In the face of—
She didn’t appeal to him.
Later in a bar with a friend. He muses: There we were,
two children really.
Later in a bar with only one question. It begins: If we had had
the child—It ends: could he have shielded her from herself?
Later in a bar, he has had a few, he begins: mad, madder than
He ends: Miss. Miss. Understand.
His friend answers only because he thinks he must
but a touch would do—It’s a shame. He says: A shame. A shame.
No one is sad to have saved himself.
He lives. And what is better than a cold beer?
Even with her wet eyelash picking up dust she must realize.
In another language hunger might bring her to her feet
but there is no hunger in English. Desire, longing—
every emotion in a relationship with too much of itself.
Not unlike the aphid sucking sap, soon we are unable
to swallow: aphagia.
and its meaning: If she stabs her throat thirty times
(a stab at each year) she knows what would pour out
but what pours in?
What put her here brought her to the ground so to speak.
Or did she (not he) simply stretch out? She
in reality at peace, face down. Laughing still.
Her body twittering like a machine.
Hard to keep flesh in the mind’s eye
when the story
is a mountain range pulsing.
One day it is happy birthday or I love you or how did you know?
The next day, the next minute,
the ceiling is falling or calling her name or whispering,
rinse your face of this, whispering, be your own—
Funny, isn’t it?
lying on the ground too ironic to call for help.
Again the naked nude must suggest the soul’s
bold face:
a bold personification of eye
a bold personification of sky: purview)