Cleaning Up: Bathroom
“This is the edge of not running”
The
Edge of Something
Linda
Gregg
(and there are
clouds
and wide
spreading legs
of lightning
and you are absent
from all this—absent)
She’d come this
far to get this far without stopping
without thinking,
without really touching
the swabs of bloody
cotton plugging the sink
and then there’s
that mate
to the set of
teeth, what grinning?
Frowning? in an
old margarine
container and
flecks (if they were real
teeth that
potting soil would be
along the
gum-line) but here, listen
even false
things tell facts
or if not
facts, truths:
ü
left
too long the fat
will
separate from the fragrance
and
the fragrance
from
the water
and
one wonders
is
it still, after all these idle
months,
shampoo?
ü
the
nude spaces in the medicine
cabinet
are dust.
what’s missing
was
missing when they, whoever
they
are, got what they came for
and
left her.
ü
what’s
missing matches
the
receipts
in the kitchen for morphine
and oxycontin
and amitriptyline
and too many others to list
and there’s
more, there’s so much
more but there’s
two rooms left
to go and it’s
late
and she’s made
it almost
to the end
without once thinking
about who broke
in who broke
the dishes who
broke the bones
of the woman’s
thin
cheek and eye
socket who could make
such a blue, a
school ink blue
her grandmother’s
blue-black mourning
veil blue, or,
last spring, the days
after ringing
the new bull calf Hereford
and the blue-black
contrast
against his
blond
belly and the
color, she’ll swear it had one,
of his bawl
in the barn at
night and the stall
floor chipped
and splintered
when she’d pull
the sawdust and hay
away in the morning,
the way,
in this bathroom she pulls
things now, with
her
second wind,
out into the
middle,
into a pile,
big enough for any stall fork
or shovel…
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