Tag Archives: gabriel gadfly

Sometimes, when you and I are sitting
at the breakfast table, drinking coffee
and eating toast with strawberry preserves,
I am struck with the sudden and irrational terror
that an alien might claw through your sternum
and burst shrieking from the pale valley
between your breasts.

I imagine the scene in slow-motion:
your head flails back, mouth agape
in a soundless O, your slender fingers
fluttering on the table. Breakfast scatters.
Strawberry viscera splatters my cheek.
Your chest and my mouth are screaming.
You comment, gently, that today is a pretty day,
which isn’t really what most people do when
extra-terrestials are wriggling out of their lungs,
but you never do predictable things and that
is part of what I love about you.

I watch too many movies, but you are still lovely
and I want to take you into the bedroom,
press my ear to your chest and listen to
the reassuringly singular beat of your heart.

I was eating Cheetos,
so if I looked surprised
when you asked me
if you were doing the
right thing when you agreed
to meet your ex-boyfriend
for lunch (he was ten
minutes late and anyway
he had cheated on you
throughout your long
relationship), if I looked

surprised, it was only
because it is very difficult
to give a wise and profound
answer when one has
orange crumbly cheese stuff
stuck between your teeth,

and guys like me
who write poems are
always looking for
wise and profound answers
to questions like that.

I still don’t have an answer.

I know only this:
the sunlight through the window
wrapped your sadness in a glow,
and your smile,
brief though it might have been,
showed me your heart:

a book with a damaged cover,
asking someone to turn the first page.

The old man at the end of the road
has staked a big red sign
to his front lawn,
and the sign says NO.

Just NO.

Stark white letters
on a red field so angry
you can feel it like a sunburn
hot on the neck of the street.

I don’t know what he protests.
The meetings of men’s lips, maybe,
or the sweat on a busy immigrant’s brow.
Coffins coming home with flags
draped over their lids,
or the debt draped on his grandkids’ backs
just so they can learn something.

Maybe he’s just angry
at the inexhaustible creep of age:
the aches in his hips
and the grit in his bones
and the pills that damn fool doctor
tells him he ought to take.

Whatever it is,
he makes sure everyone
who passes by
knows he disapproves.

When you were at work,
I picked up your journal —
a slim book bound
in soft brown leather —
I snuck it out
from the bedside table,
I held it in my hands,
I felt it over and over,
and finally peered inside.

I want you to know
it was not to look for
anything written about me.

I just wanted to learn you
in a way I hadn’t yet,
in ways I couldn’t
suss out on my own,
and this is what I learned:

You wrote about
your mother’s hands,
about her white hands
wrinkled, her nails chipped
and unpainted, pitted
with soap and work.

They smelled like laundry,
the kind that is only clean
because you’ve knotted
and kneaded and soaked
and swished and wrung
until your elbows ache,
until your fingers ache.

You wrote about
the green glass earrings
your Aunt Callie wore
until the day
her last hard husband
was put beneath the earth,

handmade teardrops
hung on wire —
even cracked,
they caught the light

and you wrote about
the river full of stones
she threw those earrings into,
to grind them down to dust,
to grind them down,
she told you.

You wrote about
your sister’s girl,
this straw-haired kid
who digs for earthworms
with her fingers
in the silty muck
beside Moldhauer Creek,

about their fat
wriggling bodies
in her little white hands,
the way she pinches them
and laughs.

You wear your father
like a hand-me-down suit,
threadbare grey and worn.
He clings too snug,
too clenching at the shoulders.
He digs in at the waistband
he rides up at the wrists,
there is no space for you
to move and breathe.

You are larger than your father
could ever have been,
but you keep trying to fit
inside the shape of him.

Now you walk down the street
and see these people comfortable
mingling colors and fabrics
in ways you know your father
would have thought unthinkable.
If only you could take him off,
and one day, maybe, but not yet.

Your father’s pockets are full of holes
but you still fill them and wonder
why you cannot carry change.

Cherry stems tie knots
around your tongue,
and that’s a fancy trick,
sexy in some ways,
if you were making love
to a cherry tree,

But I’ve got a better one:
I can tie you in knots
with a thread of secrets
and whispers.

You wake up one morning
with a great black splintered crack
through your belly,
edged out hard,
and chalked over.
This is what happens
when a crust of ache forms
on the froth white of hurt
and then breaks:
it sunders and splits
down the middle of you.

But listen close,
listen quiet,
listen
to the sound issuing
out of it:
the hush-shush of sea
blue notes, the whale-whispers,
from your conch belly hollow,
the sour tired song
of a cold choir,
it scrapes back its chairs
and slaps its chests
with numb slabs of hand,

the mother rock wren
flits in with dead grass
and tangled hair
to nest down in your gut
and sing her dry trill song
among the spotted eggs
she’s laid.

You abuse the word.
You have never measured its weight.

You say it with a lightness
that ignores my
twenty-nine year old sister
playing with Barbie dolls
and unable to run her own bathwater
for fear she might scald the skin
off her thighs.

You say it with a lightness
that ignores my family’s celebration
when years and years of work
finally paid off and my sister learned to read
the year her brother, four years younger,
started high school.

You say it with a lightness
that ignores the woman who
would not let her daughter
be near my sister because
she thought my sister’s brain
might be contagious
and you say it with a lightness
that ignores my sister’s furrowed
brow when she overhears the word
you think she does not understand.

You say it with a lightness
that ignores every stare
my fearless sister walks under.

You say it with a lightness
that ignores the boy in my sister’s class
who bruises his temples with his fists
because he is frustrated hunting words
his tongue doesn’t understand how to form:
words like “toothpaste” and “basketball” and
“I don’t know how to tell you my body hurts.”

You say it with a lightness
that ignores the boy in my sister’s class
who dies at twenty-two because his body
was born stamped with an expiration date
sooner than yours and
you say it with a lightness
that ignores my exhausted mother
trying to tell my sister what death is.

You say it with a lightness
that ignores everything else my sister is:
her love of rocking chairs and dancing,
fleece sweaters and Mexican food;
her fear of thunderstorms
and the sound of people fighting.

You abuse the word.

You do not know better
than to disrespect its weight,
but I hope,
after years and years of work,
you too will learn.