Disambiguate

Disambiguate:

to Establish a Single Semantic or Grammatical Interpretation for

You who long for things

who can’t understand borders

who like to spread your magic and your blame

forgive yourself.

She’d given you an impossible task:

she’d said to follow and you intended to.

But you’d come to a place in the forest

where there weren’t any tracks—

                                    From “First Tractate”

                                    Brenda Hillman

I.

Seems simple but I looked it up, tractate,

and it led me to disambiguate,

the way I’d looked up the shorts

of that eighth grader who let himself

be seen—I don’t think I had to look

far—and it led to all that hung there, relaxed as a

stuck out tongue and one laid

egg—a one worder—one warm

reserve, suspended, waiting.

                        II.

Who’s got one at that age though,

a treatise—? Because all I notice at first

is the root treat and that can mean

something forbidden and sweet,

like what’s behind those satin trunks,

or it can be deed, the way my father’d

pull my mother up the stairs

or the way she’d fall, years

later, down them, breast-bone

broken open over her shredding lungs

such a flimsy cage for her flaccid

birds…

                        III.

And who can fight back?  I mean, Jesus,

they weren’t hawks, those lungs, more

like canaries revived and suffocated

at equal turns, song all but sterilized,

as though when they’d gone under

the invisible carbon monoxide blade

a hand reached in and lifted

them up to the air and shook them

with a kiss, maybe two, but one’s enough

to be seduced. Hell, a glance is 

enough.

                        IV.

Balls and birds—they don’t exactly…

ok, maybe.  It’s their tight fright and flight, the suck

up into the sky of the pelvis when the water’s cold

and everything practically disappears

so you have to coax it out again with one

finger against the palsied breast

                        V.

while on the outside it’s all hunky dory

no one’d know, no one’d guess opening the door

that the kitchen’s a disaster area

and the wife’s intubated after some girl

and two men came for pills and choked the bird

instead, bird that flew first chance out and after resuscitation

its ER/ICU beeps and swishes and soft

soled shoes.  And her restrained wrists taut

against the bar are what she wakes up to,

                        VI.

and listen, her once best friend is in

the waiting room with her husband who’s talking to me

about overdosing and then about fawns,

how they’re born odorless, how still

they are in the grass, not a scent on them

and the coyote walks right by

thinking the grass shakes with wind

                        VII.

and the orderly looks like the boy

who tugged at his sack all those years ago

and looked at me and smiled and knew

and walked away knowing, disappearing

forever in the tall dune grass,

the salt and sulfur all drift and off course 

in the swift southeast wind.

Buttons

Buttons

I like thinking about unbuttoning

words.  As though there’s a whole box

of them to reach into,  sounds to sift bit by bit

between fingers and tinks against

rings.  They aren’t as cheap a currency

as they’d seem—they open and close—

whatever, there’s a gift in the do and undo

a shirt of words, a bone button on the blue

linen.  It’s sewn on again and again,

so that now, years after being new,

it’s the only original—the rest: they are

where the sifting begins:     

            because undoing makes it all loose

            a stretch of thread, the heavy breath

            of the moment pops it off—it is a small

            satellite, some find after sweeping

            or maybe it’s picked

            out of the dust from under

            the bed.  Imagine the missing,

            the missed, the stunning button, not the shirt,

            and then the fingers that stitched it

            in the vacancy, tie the knot, rock

            the teeth back and forth to cut it all

            away from the needle fog, it

            with their breathing.

Do you want the button or the breathing?  And then,

because it’s up to you, which string of words?

After Bishop's Iceberg

After Bishop’s Iceberg

We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship,

although it meant the end of travel.

                                    Elizabeth Bishop              

                        from “The Imaginary Iceberg”

I know, and you know it is so, the slow floe…

            Yet we need to see them from ships,

            and from far off, watch them stay still, filled

            with blue air a thousand, thousand years

            old.  In their middle at least.  From here

            that age’s a guess, a melancholy, a shiver

            we can’t give rhythm because the ship’s turned

            starboard and don’t we have to look over

            our shoulder and isn’t the wind off the stern

            blowing out our carefully pinned

            hair and don’t we brush it away so some comes

            undone entirely, from the scalp, and it rides

            though who’d know, over the backs

            of arctic birds to, oh we’d never guess

            in a thousand thousand freezes or thaws

            the crack and yawn of a whole face calving

            so slow when the bow is lifted we only slip

            up the gunwale, (because we've already fallen)
            hair flat to the cheek,  

            the left cheek—a heat we wonder later, must

            have begin in the middle of that solid float

of almost stone.