Book of Dog. Cleopatra Mathis

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СКАЧАТЬ a little, chokes out

       water from a gaping mouth. She massages with one finger

       where the lungs might be. More droplets gurgle up;

       mouth to mouth is needed

       along with pumping. But she can’t, not without

       some small opening to blow through,

       safe distance from her own mouth, which

       has released a little drool, working in sympathy

       as if she can convince this thing to be saved—

       how hard can it be in the tame backyard pool?

       And why can’t he come out of the house

       with some other idea, that tumbler of straws

       plain on the kitchen counter; why

       for God’s sake, won’t he come out and help?

Their Chamber

       She was thinking of his explanation

       as a kind of Möbius strip, circling

       endlessly, seamlessly reversing and twisting

       to reveal the underside, on-going words. Lost in it,

       she reached down into the limited

       rough space between the bed and the wall,

       and her hand came up skinned, the top layer

       from knuckle to wrist peeled away.

       This was part of her usual vigilance—

       He would spill something, lose something, and she’d

       rush to wipe away, find the missing,

       like this automatic retrieving of his sock—

       Beaded with blood, she examined

       the wide scrape in addition

       to sunspots, moles, the wormy down-under,

       raised-vein look of her skin. Another thing on her body

       to heal outside, while inside

       running through her, the ribbon of his words:

       no, then yes, yes, and no again. Oh what did he want

       and how could she manage to wait

       for the circling to stop—

       how could she keep still?

When She Spoke, He Closed His Eyes

       So she tried to disappear, obliged

       by his own disappearing, becoming

       who she wasn’t. Not there was not

       who she was, and not how she was.

       She could tiptoe out, he could be

       relieved or (surprise!) come searching.

       But how would that work

       when he needed her to be there

       in order to make her gone, disappeared

       into other. What other? she thought, wondering

       how to make herself into someone

       absent, so she could be the one

       he would welcome, wide-eyed, wanting

       to hear whatever it was she had to say.

Labyrinthitis

       1. When it began

       First a fret in which everything changed.

       By morning an underwater language

       had overcome me.

       When I tried to rise

       my body said fall, and so I did.

       My weighted hair, my head

       turned me over. I could not hear him straight.

       I was a doll with a mechanical box, the Mama

       crying over and over, a dummy,

       a dropped marionette.

       Hold me, I said.

       So sorry, he said.

       2. Not making sense of it

       If he was calling, I was too far under—

       arm over arm

       tangled in the heaving wave,

       the body catching

       the slap of stones,

       swept through a passage.

       The brain’s sea in a little box

       washed in, a spinning top

       come to a stop. Tilted.

      •

       He was walking some inert shore.

       Always the lifeguard, he used to say,

       eyes fixed on the water.

       3. Nevertheless a common disorder

       Some infection in the water, a nastiness

       washing through. At first an incidental ache,

       then recurring, inflaming

       the air-filled cavity of the middle ear—

       who knows how it starts,

       how it finds the inner ear,

       a spiraling labyrinth,

       the fluid-filled temporal bone

       where two organs live: the embedded

       nerves for hearing, or mis-hearing,

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