For a couple years, I slept nights in Babe’s basement on a low gold couch right up
next to the wood burner, mom had been displaced from her own house, long story,
so my sister and her kids and husband could live there, they’d crossed the bridge
to move back home because Em had a hole between two chambers of her heart,
mom stayed in a one-room place, a little crouching house set back off the road
behind the trailer park, kerosene lamp, nowhere for me to sleep, so I’d run across
the yard and crawl under the barbed wire to Babe’s basement door, they’d keep it
unlocked for me, when I needed to pee, I slipped out the door in the middle
of the night to unbridle my stream like an animal, squat and watch the snow steam,
and back inside where the fire logs too were animals, settling in and licking each other
with blue tongues, Vic was still alive then, Vic Senior, he had his shop set up down
there for rock polishing, agates and tiger eyes, pick, he said once, and I chose a fire
opal, I guess the conditions of our lives were bad but I was at peace, feeding logs into
the stove’s mouth, alone with the precious stones, there in the fabled underground.

I was not a large child, though large in silence, learned
from pods and brambles and cattail’s velvet fruit. Like
the world, which began as a pea-sized notion under
the mattress of an over-sensitive girl, I grew vast, too vast,
it was said, for my landscape’s monsters: cows, mudpuppies,
bullfrogs, Polyphemus moths with purple eyespots on their wings,
nightcrawlers in the worm bin, catalpas inside-out on the hook,
nature, outmoded as stockings with a seam up the back, as rations
and iron pills and traction for back pain, dad strung up
and weighed down until they figured out it was a tumor. I flew
faraway to feel molecular, but even among the throng, my life
was enormous, a raucous tragedy, having outgrown its theater’s
cherubs and filmy purple curtains and thereby gushing
out into the street, filling it with arterial soliloquys.

I’ve encountered the exoskeleton of a book I wrote or poem
or word I passionately laid upon the page, the passion’s gone,
the word looms, ambered, hunched, uncanny, dead-eyed, gold
light shines through it like a lithophane, I have wanted to dig up
the dead to see what’s left, would almost rather meet the shell
than the soul, break the frozen ground, burial vault, box they house
them in which could be reduced to copper handles, hinges, and screws,
the body just an armful of kindling or handful of blue fibers from
the designated suit, the list of pall bearers still in a drawer somewhere
and the alternates in case someone couldn’t stomach bearing the corpse
from hearse to church and back to hearse and then to graveside, the story
played out in rectangular units like plant cells or jail cells of a career
criminal or stations of the cross or that multihued Jell-O concoction
called funeral salad or uniform rooms in a Bauhaus dollhouse.