Specula
To the man pressing the sonogram over my ovary,
who is saying, It’s completely shut down:
it is still part of my body
it is alive
it is mine.
I want to know:
Is it velvety when you hold it?
Is it ghostly white?
Is it fragrant?
Does it hum?
This is where all my children
would have sprung
if you could time-lapse back:
magnificent glands,
corrugated, grooved
and furrowed:
alea, meaning dice
as in aleatoric music: Mozart
selected a precise sequence
of notes
based on throwing
a handful.
*
Beauties, we are,
we say beautiful:
estradiol in our
vaginas
and windswept fires in our veins.
*
Oblivion.
Yes, that
moment. I can’t help thinking
it must be a little choppy, Philip Larkin said.
I am going to the inevitable, he squeezed
his nurse’s hand
right before. Yes,
1:24 a.m.
As a fly fisherwoman
steps into the stream
on the other side of the world,
wading through water with atoms older
than the solar system,
trout eggs buried
in gravel nests, two eyes develop, and the alevin
hatch, absorbing golden-saffron yolk sacs
until they can slip free of the stones,
dark fry swimming up
into the
sun.
*
Velvety &
intensely saturated
in a single simile, I mean
smile.
Our lips. Smear of shade named Captive.
*
What of need,
when you want less?
When you think you want less.
When the self is less, you think:
Look how my bones osteoporosis
my pelvis endometriosis,
my ribs fractious. This is the
house, my
house, my only home, I own no other.
I lease
one car.
This is the my body,
the beauty—yes—I
abandoned. To feed
on more expensive
tastes. A cage to decorate
became a cage to pain,
this structure, this cage—
if I could build a cage instead. How do you disinherit
your self. Tectonic, indeed.
Normal faults
create space
when the ground cracks,
but as one tectonic plate forces itself
on another, this is a thrust fault.
I am full of faults.
Natural
mistakes, they lie
until uncovered. Fun
fact:
A fault under the Himalayan peaks
pushes them up by a centimeter
each year. . . .
*
Would my life coach think this was busywork?
*
I want to hold
all that remains:
iron in our blood,
calcium in our bones,
oxygen we breathe
tracing back to starburst.
And in our DNA
roses and petals fall around us as
sounds of the audience during Philip Glass’s composition
without musicians. Not an attempt to bring order out of chaos
but—waking up to the very life we
are living.
*
Ivory, bone—
faces marked
with dots. Who do I think I am?
*
If you think about less
you consider
microbes from the world’s oceans
—so tiny until 50 years ago scientists didn’t
realize the specks were alive:
now 40 million genes identified
in upper layers of seawater—
constantly dancing, keeping our ecosystem
balanced.
Some
faults
release earthquakes. Others
release
energy, quietly.
*
Doors opening to doors flung wide imprint of window frames
you see from one end to the other and out to crab apple unpruned past
front door with five random locks
*
as if I weren’t going to save anything to pass on.
*
Her name was Page
and she let people write stories
all over her
her name was Page
and she was a writer, and though she didn’t believe it,
I do.
Her name was Page and she
was nothing
but a sheet of paper
that’s the story
and it’s an old story
her name was Page
and she wrote it down.
Her name was Page and she was born of women to live
awhile and fall and die.
*
Then you go home and forget it.
*
Her name was Page and the skin on her hands
was becoming invisible.
You could see blue veins
through thinning
membrane.
Small spongy discs
in her spinal column
were
compressing.
Yet her knee looks wider, not as
graceful.
Her name is Page
and she is almost exactly
—and at the same time—not at all what she was.
If you only love
what you can’t possess,
she should love herself immensely.
If body is reparation,
she could skin
all the stories written over her torso
and bind
them
in
a book,
thin muslin psalm of self.