It’s been months since a neighbor rang the doorbell with a quiche or lentils or a bag full of fat purple grapes doomed to rot into mush on the counter
the mail slot silent, the last card long ago shoved through its brass mouth and you are thankful in a way because the worst is over
your beloved is dead and yes, you know, there are things that are worse than death but still you keep thinking of another line but you can’t find the right page
somewhere in the rural dust of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina where a daughter’s husband has died and the mother tells her, face held in her hands,
this is your face now this is the oldest your face will ever look, you look at the photos of his face, you bone-pick them bare,
you’d eat the pictures if it’d make him a permanent part of you and the world has moved on.
Because of a clerical error for which the temp agency sincerely apologizes, today I’m a tour guide at “Jimmy’s Sistine-Chapel Warehouse Replica
and Gift Shop!” where I try to avoid laser-pointing to the Biblical genitals while children and art critics ask about pigment-to-egg ratios of contemporary fresco restoration.
These people saved for weeks for a tour with an eloquent expert named Albert, and I won’t tell them they got me instead. Though my father warned,
“Don’t trust someone who never says, I don’t know,” when the critics question if I’m sure the panel overhead is titled “Then God Makes a Red Planet,” I think not of my father,
but of confident, informed Albert and shout, “Contrapposto!” which is a word I remember from art appreciation class. “Why is that naked man building a boat?”
a child asks about Noah, and I say, “God wanted a re-do.” When I point to Samson’s rippling thighs, I am embarrassed I wore shorts.
How often have I wished to exchange body parts—legs, stomachs—with a passerby? One who could walk tall surrounded by all these fearless nudes.
The children are confused about God ready to touch his index finger to Adam’s, assembling him from dirt.
“God should have used gold or rubies,” a blond boy says, “but who am I to criticize?” A girl asks, “So Adam is our great-great grampa?” “If so,” I say, “Our great-great-great grampa
is earth.” The critics point at me, and I point at the ceiling, where, as usual, the divine and the human point at each other.
The heat’s so bad the lilies put out a limp perfume And the chipmunks sag through their holes Like a bridge-and-tunnel crowd on their wasted way home.
I’m listening to the bees in the summer garden, their big Furry bottoms striped like rugby shirts, A scrum humming some sad doo-wop in the flower wombs.
I’ve been stuck for weeks in a house of grief and cable TV And a dozen kinds of condiment, And I’m feeling a little hemmed in, all funky and stirred up.
Soon there’ll be a sunset like an oozing wound, and then A moon in the crotch of the dogwood tree. In this wreckage of hours, what now can I do?
Not even weeping Jesus with a bush hog And a weed wacker Could push this earth around and make it work.
I’d save myself and others in their own worse way, But words won’t do it when there’s Nothing inside the fortune cookies but suicide notes.
Listen, while you were over ogling ogives and trefoils, chancels and bays, the things you left behind were quietly giving up, flying to pieces, falling apart almost together. That grinding whine up front you thought was brakes failing? It was, but that’s not all: the last shred of resistance is gone from the shocks, every bump is now like the thump of a flawed heart, but that’s not all: the tires have gone slick and bland in your absence, unevenly worn like the martyr that marries a slob, wait, there’s more: not only can’t you stop at will, you can’t get started, the juice is dead some slackness in belt or disc something not flowing the black box caked with inertia. Listen, you cried at the Royal Wedding and swallowed the cream, meanwhile the tube lost its sight: snow, garbled snow in its face and a twisting of speech unknown in Babel, O things have been going to pot, the paint peeling off your house, leprous, obscene, what about that? The food has vanished under the weed, the path has forgotten where in the world it was headed, the mower that might begin to set things aright is all smoke and flame and missing parts, shorn of its function. Maybe you thought as you turned away toward exotic joys the objects you’d secretly started to hate would await your return unchanged loyal and fixed in their whatness? You forgot the revenge of decay, you forgot how even immobile things, unloved, blindly careen and plummet, how care is a constant curing, our bulletin first last and always: Aid.
Okay you’re back: the fat and languor are through. The wind has shifted to pelt what’s left of the garden. Strange birds are swarming the shorter days. You dreamed and the world dissolved but already the perfumes of distant sugars begin to escape from your larder, and you open your eyes to the list of your derelictions, whelmed with the staggering costs of restitution. It is time you accept your share in the damage and spend what needs to be spent. Repair.
New Ohio Review 