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| Sandra Meek [Paul O'Mara] |
from Sandra Meek’s Road Scatter:
The
History of Air, Part I
Once
there was a once,
a
story
she
added each night to
until
the calendar slipped
from
the wall, her blood running
away
from my hand’s small pressure
stroking
her hand, spilling back
like
grape juice down a straw
a
child plays, not
drinking
—
Her
room’s fluorescence
bays
the dark beyond
the
doorknob she could turn,
once,
when constellations glittered
until
she clicked them
off
behind blinds underscoring
the
night she no longer
distinguishes
from morning.
She
could field
any
midnight’s lightning,
then,
before the question
she’d
swept to the back of her brain
wine-stained
her skull
with
the jewel of a continent
she’d
never travel, all
but
the purple cap of veins pulling
away
from, I swear, the
shrinking
bone. I stroke
her
hollowing brow; cradle
the
ivory knob topping
her
spine’s pebbled
bow
of smoke, memorizing
the
fragrance of her strawberry-yogurt moan
as
they turn her, the poise
of
the oxygen canister in the corner, its bomb-
like
mechanism sealed
off
as the room’s perpetual machine
purrs
on —
Perfect
pitch
lies
in the bone, the flute
and
whorl of it: the body a tuning fork
struck
into sound even as language
abandons
her — We swam
over lakes, over big thick strings
of
water —
for a stammer
in
her wrist; the small hiss
of
a dowsing-rod nosepiece
gifting
her what she
can
no longer take
in,
the upstaging
air,
a magician’s last poof
as
dry ice pours crematorium smoke
into
velvet stage curtains, like clapping
two
erasers, all chalk
and
muffling, as into the pillow
beneath
her I could almost,
almost
—
Extinction
Each
day an emerging
Ring
of rib, definition
Another
pearl scimitar
Sheathed
in fawn. The paradise of west
is the sun
Always
falling. Nothing’s as permanent as passing
Transience,
the wing
Whirred
to light, the moon’s moth-dust
Ghosting
noon. Each blink a little
Not-seeing
Warding
off blindness, the gate
Of
skin and lash swings
On
its hinges.
How
four billion wings must have
Charged
the air. Body, ark
Of
extinguished generations, lost
Species,
will a little more hunger let her see you
As
a rack of rainbows?
Her
last rib spoons each day’s
Fainter
breath. Migrating air.
Sweet
meat of the world
Picked
clean.
The
History of Air, Part II
The
mimosa folds each tiny rack
of
green ribs as the sun
downs
and the parking lot grows
more
to distance, her night terrors
again
coming on as her name
fades
from the vomit tub where I inked it as she
did
mine on the plastic soap dish I carried
three
summers up the mountain to camp, to bonfires and sticky
blackened
marshmallows that tasted of
dirt-clotted
air —
With
all my own
death-fears,
what did I
ever
know? Not how she’d clutch
the
call-light, the narrow snake
and
wand of it, its one powder-white eye
to
press, wrist watch drifting to her elbow’s jut
and
sail; not how words would keep waying
up
the north road she,
remembering,
puts her should
to, her
hurry
to; Wipe the
spoon,
she says, we will
need
a
knife and a fork and a coat where we are going
—
Not
how I couldn’t
let
her hand go even as her veins
collapse
and she strains
into
atmosphere, into the too-thin air
always
encircling us.
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