Baby
My baby’s down with a stuffy nose, sleepless for the second night in a row.
I’ve heard that stifled thoughts can clog the sinuses,
the body conjures a disease, the immune response,
and the cure –
if you will it and believe it,
program yourself and meditate –
and you’ll be right as rain,
it’s magic.
What does a baby think? what inner programming is he engaged in?
What goes on in that little head where the vaults haven’t yet closed?
In my earliest memory
I’m six months old.
Father lays me down on a black duvet
with white polka dots.
It is not the duvet I remember, but the fear
the unnatural black-and-white contrast.
There’s a photo of me on that duvet –
a chubby curly-head in baby-blue shoes,
blue eyes brimming with tears –
they turned green later.
Tonight that green gaze is consumed with my sick baby.
I hold his hand; neither of us can sleep, so we look out the window –
the black sky is dotted
with the yellowish glow of stars.
I suddenly realize –
he’s afraid, consumed with the baby’s fear –
of the cold, of the naked branches, of heavy clothes,
afraid of the days growing shorter,
of the dark polka-dot sky
and of the hollow lens of the moon.
Food
Patissons –
like flying saucers in the garden –
I hadn’t realized we had planted them.
Hidden amongst the zucchinis, pumpkins, and cucumber leaves,
unkempt and untrimmed,
in their moist soil beds,
with wild strawberries pouting, like scabs betwixt the plums.
We feed on the wallpaper of snails and slugs.
Early in the morning we come to rip up their homes.
Later, we sit in the shade, enjoying our coffee,
watching videos on the phone, laughing,
sleeping peacefully through the night.
Only summer makes it hard to sleep –
birdsong wakes us at five a.m.,
later it’s the frogs croaking.
I awaken lit by dawn;
the first car passes by
and it’s action – a new day begins.
I open the curtains:
today we braise the patissons,
their steam shall spread through the kitchen,
mingling with sweat, it will draw the insects,
they shall crawl upon our skin.
In summer, the body is strewn with bites –
my body is dappled with scabs.
I, too, am food – made of flesh and water,
a purposeless bag of bones, in demand amongst the hungry,
another extension of eternity.
Heart
Our house is different –
my great-grandfather built it.
Horse finials ride the roof ridges,
apple trees bend over in the garden,
and heavy bunches of currants –
bottles filled with the tears of wine in fermentation –
and the inoffensive gooseberry mildew.
The gazebo, painted blue,
under a mossy rowan.
I’m in the gazebo with my grandfather –
it’s good to talk to him when he’s sober.
The swings, handcrafted benches,
various bushes, fruit trees, and colors,
secrets in the pantry, windowsills covered in dead flies.
All the cozy spots to sit down –
even the outhouse,
with a diamond cutout near the roof – not a heart –
you can’t be looking through a heart in the latrine.
There is enough heart at home anyway.
My great-grandfather died, but his heart remains,
though each year there’s less of it.
A storm broke a branch of the great apple tree.
We chopped it down.
The blue bench had rotten.
We chopped it up.
The cottage had started to rot.
We painted it over.
The horses fell off the roof.
We threw them out.
The flowerbeds grew old.
We laid a lawn there instead.
Only the outhouse stayed up behind the shed –
untouched, as if forgotten,
albeit, no –
it was the only one built
without a heart.
Sea
In a stone house by the sea
that I cannot hear crashing against the stones
I am beheld by a painted Jesus, the same age as me.
He, too, was lost to his mother.
The stones are gray and weighty;
some fall onto my heart, some into the walls,
others still seal up my womb.
I have nightmares in this house.
I sleep with my eyes half-open, and I see you,
though I cannot hear the words from your underdeveloped mouth.
Both our souls break out in stigmata;
the sea scrubs them tonight,
disinfecting with salt.
