Beneath a paved sidewalk lie two giantesses
side by side without touching but the smoke
from their breaths, or a slow fire,
is braided together in the air above the chimneys
on the square that boys and girls on
skateboards glide across.
Leather-clad fathers of daughters who use
perfumes rich in sunlight and live far from
the square – who bury, meanwhile,
their dolls in the garden – stand
by the motorcycles and eat
sugared pancakes from the shop.
Those of us who rose from the dead
sit on the benches, hold ice-cream.
A leggy dame strides across the square.
Now rings the phone of a girl dressed in black.
She answers and takes leave of her brother:
‘Emergency call! Yet another man in mortal danger!’
Her brother is the friendly boy
in the shop, the one that is always waiting for some action.
Militantly she steps into the black carriage.
‘Quick,’ pleads an anguished man on the phone and
sees in his mind’s eye his mother making a joke,
falling back with laughter – the image refreshes,
inspirits, and improves the ill; a classic last resort:
echoing mother’s laughter.
The street that the anguished man lives on was erected from paper,
he moved here to be buried alive.
A sweet death for placid people but in the interim
he just gets these terrible fits – by a
sketched garden gate the emergency vehicle skids
silently: the tyres are soft as skin.
It wasn’t a moment too soon: the pressure
inside would have in the coming minutes torn apart
the abdomen. The girl lays balmy hands
on the trouser fly and softens with
delectable medicines the life-threatening fire.
Diagnosis: white blood clot.
In other words: emergency milk clot,
which kills if a woman does not churn out
the painful blockage in the organ in time.
‘You have cured me!’ shouts the man.