After Recovery, Dressing:

After Recovery, Dressing:

            Undertaker’s Assistant

i. 

The grass and his wool scapula are stiff

in a dish along with the throbless moss I’ve been

            lifting off—it’s all, the whole room—

            about lifting, arms and legs,

            head, to slip this talisman off,

           

offer it to his mother before we give

his body.  It’s too full of the lake,

            it’s made his skin a new cartography of

            dull mustard coupled

            to near blue near his rib,

            as close to Mary’s Mantle going

stiff in that picture in the little dish.  I know I said it, but

she’s so serine, a perfect presence

            under water, and not

            a mark on him not one

            puncture or scuff from today,

just the puff of his lungs—stuffed, plugged

            sponge…and the bruising.

ii.

And soon, through the reeds, the pine trees

the birch trees a mad choir of cricket,

            their furious friction now and through

            to later, laid out straight

            on his bed while

twenty miles away, God, they’ll say later, who’d ever seen

such bats.  I'll imagine swarms, by twos and threes, screech

            and stream above the buggy

            water as humble a mirror

            as ever now,

imagine how their leathery babies wait in a cave,

imagine the squeeze of a mother’s tiny nipple.  

            It is a pin right into

            the middle and straight through

            to go out and away

and maybe maybe never get back after all

like this moss or this shrinking wool

            devotion gone stiff,

            stiff and green and limp

            the way the baked apple

berry in the bog withdraws its face,

pinches in its little cheeks, as if

            it were holding

            its breath against air

            or water or waiting,

like those pup bats, for milk their mothers

flapped off with in their little purse

            of a breast.  Warm

            as longing. Warm

            as waiting.  Holding it

all in.  As good a distraction as any, bats seem

to be here in this upstairs room, folded

            and pensive,  

            girls on one side

            boys on the other and now

while I wash you I wonder: in that whole

colony, how does she know who you are

            which clung-to-mossy

            stone brown baby

            is her own?

How she must grope and strain on her return—

how she must lay her ear and hook down

            on each little chest,

            stop her own

            breath and then slice the night

           

with her relief or grief, the way the baby

calls back or doesn’t, like now, in the street,

            through the crowd and despite it

            all I hear is the discreet

            knock, and your mother

brings your small bundle of clothes:—

starched white short sleeve shirt, and straight peaked

            pleated shorts, so straight

            I know the line

            will meet the middle

            of the knee, and not be

long enough to cover last week’s fall,  

scab dry again now, and all flaked off even

            as I’d dabbed at

            the pebbles, the silt,

            and tapped at the bruises

with my powder puff of rouge, (your arms

especially now that you have short sleeves) tap

            and cover the length of time

            you must’ve been rolled and bumped

            and pushed

against the rocks, the wake of the lake,

how you drifted and waited,  like that

            pup bat:

            little

            and adrift

on the top of his world, waiting for her

to arrive, for the scrape of a claw

            of sound

            of ache

            of hollow

response an awl through the skin, into the bone

the bat, the scapula, like breath—or like water—

            or milk…

iii.

                        it’s milk I’m thinking,

            made and made and made

           

until you’re scraped and the bottom

of everything’s let down, the ache

            that awl right into

            and through  

            your bone-bat-scapula,

the grass and moss and wailing still

stiffening, but going soft, relaxing, like

            someone caught off guard

            in a clasp: the flinch, the start,

            the pause, and, though much later, 

much, much later, the balm.