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The Guest at the Foot of the Bed | Etymology | About Sister
The Guest at the Foot of the Bed
As candle, as fur-light, as I lay waking, was staring me down
With cold orchid stones. She must have died
From wanting a human
Reply. So much like, so near,
Or hosts I don’t know spoke
Through her: nuns and some cornered by she-hounds,
et al. Her inarticulateness made apology.
It was not her look but a knowledge that she had.
Maybe the wraith I glimpsed autumning
Behind her still appears on this earth, as suggested,
Where spigots are clicked by pewter leaves
Heard fleeing (the neighbor calling from her kitchen door . . .)
(Previously appeared in: Barrow Street)
Etymology
Out of yellow brain, out
of ear, through the wheat
spear in the eye, at
least the window, over
cities, ranges,
ocean, but
I don’t mean
a letting go
of some circus
maximus,
a brutal
parent, disease.
I mean more
than consuming
with blue teeth
of flame,
or even love, more a felt
relinquishing,
as when sky gives in
to bird
or the black
trunk of oak caves
to encroaching moss
or the swan slips
a valley of light
beneath its beak,
as the river tears
its skin
to accept a stray branch.
I feel that way
when I release me
to worlds
I can’t under-
stand, and
I stand, wanting
air in my blood
and its nostalgia,
Latin
for our pain.
About Sister
In lucid moments, she would speak
about lost nights, dungareed vagrant in the outskirts,
dreaming through girders beneath the crust of sidewalk,
waking only when the train stopped at Utica.
Arms signaling in front of her, she would rush along the rat tracks,
blue sheets of newsprint lifting in the heat.
Think back to the vacant house where she cut off
her hair: plaster scraps, blown-rose wallpaper,
folding oak ceilings, and the time
they found her even higher, in a garden on the roof
of a parking garage. Doctor Moses says
this pain leaves you the way she is left:
It never kills. Two months out of the halfway house,
she would hide inside on summer nights, lie
in the sofa’s white embrace, searching its arabesque
with her nail. There were no rungs along her arm, her wrist.
But I am sure I knew more: She was the oldest,
platinum hair and a gorgeous complexion.
They said: college, marriage ahead. We would watch
her laughing, smoking, stepping into Saabs,
drawing in her silky leg. I’ve been searching
a landscape of cut black tunnels and moon-flooded
windows, checking the trash bars and alleyways,
asking. Along a rusty rail beneath a street-level train car
on its side like the carcass of a beast, I find tough, yellow,
cottony flowers twisting from chinks in the tracks, and part
of me urges: Let me let her go. Let her be.
Previously appeared in: Natural Bridge.