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Still
Life with Yews
Walking to my office I had stopped
to listen –
where are you? where are
you
–
A robin cast her flute notes
off a frost blanched roof peak,
triplets ascendant,
sweetly querulous, piercing
the heart’s rim, tugging through it
the long thread of music.
The world that bled back to my eye
had changed. The east had flushed the rose
of a cheek when the cold
compress is lifted. Narcissi
were lifting the gray mat of leaves.
The mind and body can be
separate places, that’s what had and –ing
prove, I was thinking as I rubbed my thumb
along paper, listening to my print’s
stuttering rasp. I was not turning
the page, not seeing the words, my eye
compelled to the tender new bristles
tipping the yew’s black wands.
Without the aid of any wind,
they nodded; some pulse rubbed
the blood-in-milk berry cups along the pane.
Faint static through the glass.
The pianissimo had faded; the needle
was about to lift.
And it was still the crinkle
of the paper drape I heard, the hand
outside the door, rustling through my file.
The cordial, imperturbable voice explaining
how the body mistakes
part of itself for enemy, launches cells
to kill it. That I must take a replacement
the rest of my life.
My legs hung like stopped pendulums.
I was still, somehow, in that
still life: mirror in its stainless frame,
Lucite jars of swabs and packaged
gauze. Propping my torso
with my hands’ heels, I was nodding
like the yew outside my window, with each jet of blood
downward from the heart, into the body
that was
not me, and was me.
Ward
When the East is gold leaf
beaten so thin, the sky’s
pale violet shows through, that’s when I go
to the garden to check the progress
of its labors. The peony’s fist
has pried a bit wider its birth fissure in earth.
Being human, I’m driven
to assist, stooping to unkink its wrist, to unfold
the wad of maroon tissues
snipped with half-moons, and triangles, and blades.
Partly
in pity, in part for relief,
the world gave me
two daughters to love to distract me from
my own death dread, that I might relax my hold
on her, the way you give a baby
the transparent nipple, the vinyl infant
to mother. When the nurse handed me
my first, I kissed the lip curled
in a sob of dismay, already possessed.
Then I rolled back the sleeve of her gown
and saw fingers wizened from being
too long in the bag of waters, pried open
the clenched palm to find
a shredded blister, slits in the whitened,
drowned skin revealing tissues so thin
they took their color from blood, the palm lines
a crimson M as if gouged with a stick.
How
privileged
I was in that maternity ward, able to believe
the distance of her death, that I could keep
for life what had entered the world
through my body’s gates. That it would never be
my temple and cheek grinding the sand,
my teeth bared in agony near the small hand,
the palm still enfolding loosely
the stripped twig, the skin of the fingers livid, abraded,
taken to great age in a single day
by the mother who gives to us, and gives to us,
then wrenches away in her vast wave
what we love.
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