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.
much, much later, the balm.
