unheimlich—unhoming
Oh my love I am afraid.
The sound has stopped in the day
And these images reel over
And over…
Seamus Heaney
“Wedding Day”
Later she’d liken herself to the Unhomed, that
race
of Sea-Faring Giants who lost their skill
to navigate their way,
and maybe it began when the spike
of lightning seemed rammed
straight through the wood-
stove and into her, blown telephone
off the wall, lifted beds
up from the floor, the dogs’ wiry hair
singed in the tingling
effervescent air. It seemed
a genuine exorcism as quick
as she went stiff and took that nail
straight on and lay
flat as the blown off mattress,
not smoke so much as steam,
hot fog, as though the dome
of her skull were washed and a vault
of a sepulcher
or a ceiling she’d seen
in CCD books were scorched there:
fat
bare babies twined in girdles
of
a blue so blue she doubts it’s ever seen
completely,
not even in skies wiped dry
by
an ablution like this.
Or
later she’ll see it’s a squid’s
creep
into his own ink and squim, a frenzied
epilepsy,
a slurry of thirst and revolt
of
mouth on mouth, of that seizure
gone
on long long long
enough
to bung the lung and tongue against it all.
What changes after lightning,
after the sky’s kiln insists
it’s a furnace in her, is the way
saints and Cathedrals buzz
and sputter between the shoals
of coal piles alight from inside
like that Moses tree free from char,
with all her God
inside of it.
She sees that tree,
pristine when her bare feet
insist, and the light’s tingling like blood
gone to sleep
then waking up again
in a house that, in the ripple of blast
trauma, rocks blind in the thin moat of light.
It’s all aura
all over her
palsied body.
Or when, listen, she lay beneath the dahlias
and the sun was good
to her, a quickening, a queen-kin
a dapple – that Hopkins line
she’d run to her brush to paint
against the bleach-white board:
the couple-caul that the petals were,
the brinded underbelly
of the leaf, the stipple. By heart
it’s her priest’s favorite. And
she’d paint the trout, the cow,
the finch, until her urge is sugar
juice boiled near to burn, all that water called
up the copper curl, cauterizing,
her father once said, when they lived
in South Carolina, a man’s soul-
hole. When
his horses sweet heads fell
in an Ypres sleep beneath the deep mud streets
he’d asked every angel he could name
what and why and it all came down
to silence.
All that was before. Before even
her Lubec
Daniel, though there’d be times
when she’d want the lightning more
than the water.
At night, you know?
When the whole house was
cold and sober.
When she’d press
her thumbs abductor muscles into her eye
sockets and make those rainbows
break, memorializing the slide under
the water and how first it was all that burning,
and then all that pulled her out
of it. Was it when she let go
or when he let go?
She never could tell. Akimbo with all those knees
and elbows, that long long hair
all that going black and then
when it absolutely couldn’t happen
it did:
the lightning, the sepulcher,
the moment she was surface,
was pulled out of it all, almost.
And then there were times,
most times,
when it was all the same, the way
she went under for real
those two times. She felt it
in her own knees and feet. She felt it
in her cheeks and the roots
of her teeth.
She smelled it coming
even, because instinct
had taught her this by now:
she flared her nose
her mouth, every opening
and went down
into it.
And each time
was the same yet slightly
singular.
There was nothing before
that lightning or all that water…
there was no before or beyond those
two things.
It was as if
they never ever were, as if she were
born a struck girl and then
when shoved at the shoulder,
woken up, she was never baby
born. She
was all along lost.
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