On the Ides of March

                                                           

The rules are: No Barbies and No Guns.

We should have added: One Child, One Gift;

you can’t predict the need to limit fun

at first. Now it’s too late to make the shift.

 

We’ve framed a means to organize the mess

that even three-year-olds will understand,

but laws of physics still operate: you can only compress

so much stuff in the sturdiest-lidded plastic bin.

 

Four weeks of weakness make me feel this way:

colds, sprains, broken fillings, chicken pox—

Albania in anarchy—each day

requires a bigger, stronger box.

 

Self-discipline? I gave it up for Lent—

only metaphor remains unspent.

--published in Obstructed View, Fireweed Press 2009

 

 

Corneal Degeneration

 

They shovel useless cells out the slit

then insert

the living,

scavenged off a donor’s dying

frame (small

comfort that some scraps survive central

collapse): you must take him in pieces, your partner

in sight, more critical than a pair

of glasses or contacts, but less

convenient, and hope these bits

can fill your lack, that a pinch of him, a talisman’s

enough to lift this curse.

 

Must hope this bit

will lift the morning fog that used

to clear by afternoon, then not

at all—the fog that’s wrapped

you more tightly than any lover ever did—rolling

off those low hilltops and enfolding

everything in sight:

your resilience, expectations, life.

 

Must but can’t, alone at night, no body

to see.

Doctors conjure treatment

scenarios, probabilities, medication, the success rate

for this or that procedure,

its best outcome, time to recover,

percents

and experimental possibilities:

 

in the end, they can stitch

the cut through your eye then check the stars.

 

--published in Obstructed View, Fireweed Press 2009

The Leaf in My Path (Taking My Son for Back Therapy)

 

stopping I study the cyclist’s map—

long lines stretch this way and that—

looking, while the fine scratches thicken

then thin,

for a place I have never

been, my always-so-dependable eyes

refusing, another birthday near, to move with ease

 

between close and distant things: my

son, beside me, fifteen, requires attention

at the Spine Clinic—

therapy for muscle strain

 

I went to the hospital the first time with this firstborn  in transition,

driven down a road torn

and filled with pot holes—every bump traveling

through my back where a tipped

uterus and occipent

head already ground the end

of every nerve

 

thin tears open

on the path—they’re narrow,

but startling, nonetheless

I panic every time they appear

under my wheel—as if it might actually catch in one

 

mistakes are like that—

unsettling gaps

I trace my finger

along the street

between here and there, and when we arrive

exactly where I

planned without getting lost there’s a certain

surprise—a certain

wonder to this coordination—

 

one act that doesn’t raise

complaint from the stiff

judge to my right who came

into this world tearing

at me without thought, without meaning

to, mouth curved

downward—set tight,

white like a new

healed rip that might

reopen, redder, wider—more

raw than before

 

while the leaf, dark

threat, dark from a distance something

that starts me braking,

flattens underneath

my tires like nothing

 

--published in Obstructed View, Fireweed Press 2009

 

 

My Daughter’s Root Canal

 

From the waiting room

I hear the whining

drill cut

on and off—its high-pitched tone,

the throb of nerves its tune

conjures in the mouth:

things that shouldn’t touch,

surfaces grinding—

the weak giving

way to the strong,

like one continent crushed

by another, or one system,

or Young Siward,

Macbeth’s last victim—it’s the part

my daughter played the night

the attacked tooth snapped—

 

they say it can’t be saved,

and we believe

it, let them kill what’s left in order to keep

the piece still buried

against her bone—but it screams beneath the bit,

won’t submit to long, sheathed fingertips

without a fuss;

 

the doctor, beaming, beckons me back

to take a look

at the film

of her hollowed half-tooth

repacked with plastic, its

white-lined root flickering upward

like a little torch: “See its perfect, tapered top

and this neat gap?”

he directs, dissecting for us the aesthetics

of his art, while I gape at my daughter’s swollen lip.

 

--published in Obstructed View, Fireweed Press 2009

 

 

Before the breakdown

 

In his favorite home movie,

one of the last he’ll make,

she sits hip deep in the bath, pink skin slick,

too little to frame a way out, but old enough to feel exposed, camera

focused on her red face and undeveloped chest. She

waves a hand to direct

it back, sticks

out her tongue, opens her mouth, but no

sound comes out. In the last shot she turns away but twists 

toward him

from the neck. Father laughs. I

can still hear that. And right  now, over the projector’s hum,

he reels on about how much he likes

this scene: no curtain to close between my

self and him.

 

 

Tarantella, or the Artist Instructs Her Daughter in the Steps Toward Overcoming Sensory

Sensitivity

 

Some days the unkind crush of crumbs collected

counterward becomes unbearable,

their number impossible to control,

to calculate. Each obstacle-filled circulation through the cluttered

kitchen, the crowded

downstairs, an assault like steel wool

scrubbing gold-decked china on the fragile,

misconnected mind: mind

 

this connection, Miss: I’m dancing as fast as my limited feet allow,

trying to lash at creeping spider lesions, to shake loose eerie legions crawling

up and down awl-pricked, echo-skinned limbs: lost in ear

canals become uncannily sea-wide, trapped at the back of eye

lids, their little legs wave  like they belonged in the fringe’s interstices while ringing

I try to tear at terror.

On the Spectrum

 

You’d never know—as he tries to hide his head

like a bird beneath a most unbirdlike,

naked wing, each feather plucked

so that the pale, never-seeing-sun stripped skin’s exposed,

gaze grounded,

not on worm-watch, as you might think,

and focused, every muscle tensed, on impending strike,

unwilling to sink his chances by returning unwanted

 

greetings, looks—that he can soar

sometimes, even on those less-than-perfect

parts, take to the sky and glide, at least

a little while, while he fails to remember

what he lacks—flaps, what he can and can’t:

the ground, when he unties their eyes, always yanking itself from under his missing feet.

 

 

Symploce

 

When the blood vessel blooms

like a dahlia on the crazy surface

of his surgeon’s brain, he’s on vacation in Vegas.

When the blood vessel like a red dwarf that spins

too many times

about the worn out axes

of itself goes super nova, he’s on vacation in Vegas.

When the blood vessel, its lever yanked again, begins

 

to spill spare change like water all over his faltering

feet, he’s on vacation in Vegas for the last time, and it’s hard

to say whether he’s hit the jack

pot, or run out of luck, dropping

like that mid-toss, before he finds out whether he’s won or lost, two boys left behind,

friends from all over exploding off their hard seats to converge on the wake.

 

 

© Wendy Vardaman