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.