Cleaning Up What’s PTSD

Cleaning Up What’s PT

                                    SD

I am the one chosen by the lion…

and dragged back from the shining water.

Yanked back to the bushes and torn open, blood

blazing at the throat and breast…

Taken as meat.  Devoured as spirit…

                           “Chosen by the Lion”

                                    Linda Gregg

(it’s just that you’re not shining

when I get here, and it’s this pain

that perches right on the lip

of my temples and laps, it’s own

ignorant ocean)

Saving the bedroom for last she thinks now maybe

she should’ve started there, even with a nose

cauterized by bleach, even furrowed

and crimped fingers apathetic to the boiled-

but-gone-cold-quick water—even, and this

is the worst of it, the car wreck

of a bedroom after the pure surface,

after that long time/first time under is at a blur

a panic really when her head goes cold

in the wind and everything under the chin’s

still a fabulous molasses, a thick dipping,

like that first thumb into the warming dish

with the bit of fried dough and the fresh melting

cow’s butter.  It’s what was on the breakfast

table when the phone rang thirty years ago

and stepping into this, (even after all the rooms

are cleaned) this takes her back... And still a seasoned cop—

or the Tet medic up the street, even, Jesus,

the priest sifting through his breviary:

            Lord + open my lips

            And my mouth…

Her brother told her, before deploying, that Vietnam was, he said:

ü  It’s Mary

ü  and her sworn sisters and a nearly man John

ü  It’s some Roman soldier just off the boat

ü  It’s this corpse and all the linen they could muster

ü  It’s a parting and a going out under a moon after he’s cleaned

ü  and that stone that infamous stone that fucking stone

            that in three days is a pebble a sweet worry in her pocket

            (he brought one back for her in  early ’69 and was dead

              three weeks later...a whole year there and home)           

Oh but those resurrection days have not arrived—oh but such

things as happen in broad daylight oh but the miles

and years between this and those is the submerging and the squeezing out

of water to wash a body clean, or a crime scene

though nobody will call it that for years.