Four poems from "Flywheel"

I Know Why I Make the Past A Destination

I remember the ivy,
the way it whiskered up the brick
of the hospital’s old wing,
its broad, red-edged leaves lifting,
drowsily, like paws. So beautiful,
and disturbing—its tenaciousness,
the way it seemed to insist climbing
was the only natural thing,
while, across the lot, the new glass wing
I waited in shivered like a mirage,
like a rib that had been extracted from a cloud.
We don’t need medics to push you,
these things run on tracks now,
the doctor said, and he looked familiar
in his white coat and corduroys,
explaining how now it was possible
to get a map of every illness you’re likely to get,
or to die from, in your life.
I kept looking past him, at the vines outside,
those burnt hands curling,
thinking it’s always been frightening
to be alive, the way we can almost,
but never quite, remember the future.
I’ve traced fate on the underside
of a hand, and on a leaf,
but that was quaint,
nothing like it would have been once
to pass your palm, damp and shaking,
across a table to the reader you needed to believe.
It must have felt something like this—
sweating under a paper gown, swallowing blue fluid,
buckling the body and its unknown future to a table
that inches persistently forward under slicing light.
Always this stillness before you divine.

(First published in the New Delta Review.)

*

The Bone

I found it in the garden
below the flint arrowheads.
When tapped, it rang like glass,
and was so light to hold,
it could have been composed of breath.
Space gave it form
by way of endless inner catacombs,
miniscule brittle chambers
I saw as epochs of air,
that once had been water,
once dust, and once marrow.
One side had broken from its host
with the frayed, desperate edge
of the death rattle or birth tear.
I could see where it had fought
not to be so individuated.
The other was a smooth knob
I rubbed like a worry stone
and felt long ago rolling
in a socket swaddled in sinew,
swiveling amid the blood-beat
the hip of some dark, swift being.
I wrapped it in soft cloth.
Carried it secretly to school.
Laid it in a drawer and checked it
so often it shined and darkened
with my life, its shared air hollowing me.


*

What I Meant to Say About Childhood

was the morning infusing us and
borders more like fur
than surface, slurred
with sun and somehow spilling
into others, bowls into bowls,
our heads dipped and bobbing
as we sat in the half-moon
on the wooden floor.

This was in Indian-style,
our legs over and under,
knotted in the trust that everything
was what we had to learn.

And so we listened
as the white-haired woman read
the words: purple, juniper, bread and spoon,
and she called each world
good in the way she held it—
its laminated spine
like the crackling stem
of a newborn’s head.

Our heads then were huge
bone baskets, made mostly of openings
and we leaned them into the moment
light crested and split
against the frames of things,
the shapes they told us to memorize
while we felt their volumes filling up.

Remember that, when still my hand
in yours was either one? Wasn’t it
the most gradual thing, this sharpening
into edges?

(First published in The Southern Review.)

*

The Animator

It’s terrible work for the lighthearted.
I meant to do cartoons or video games,
but the law firm had the only job I found,
doing reenactments. Each week,
a lawyer sends in a single-spaced brief
and I begin again the history of blame.
I order the events like a dog-eared deck
of cards, show how a lover’s finger
stiffens, in increments, as it pulls a trigger,
or the way a semi-truck can ricochet
and swipe a van like a bottle over a guardrail.
Once, I had to follow underwater,
make the father unbuckle all three kids
before he ran out of air and couldn’t kick
the windows free. The children’s hands reached out
like starfish, their hair rose into golden bells,
but their faces—I had to make their faces blank.

Mostly, we concern ourselves with things,
frame the flight of a bullet as it tears
through a jacket, into the dune of a woman’s breast.
Did you know bullets explode into roughly drawn stars?
Have you ever seen cells rush in to sluice a wound?
You can almost hear the body’s coalition
roaring with rage. It gets predictable
as science fiction—skin a desert crust
over red drifts of tissue,
ribs the battened hull of a mother ship,
and the blood, the minions and minions
of diligent soldiers.

My job is to direct the juror’s eye,
so I cut a little beauty into every frame—
maybe a rain-slicked street ribboned with headlights,
a bright maple leaf or worn gold ring.
But the best it gets is when I spend all day
with something small and concrete—
an axle, say, or a buckle— something
that failed through no fault of its own.