or when. Black hope rises,
bursts inside me. “It’s an aggravate of sells,” he says—
The world grows thin. My friend packs up the toys and kit,
tapping at her soapy vial.
She shakes up the foam and sticks in the pipe.
A world blows up.
The mother and child float by in it.
VESSELS
Shouldn’t it ache, this slit
into the sweet
and salt mix of waters
composing the mussel,
its labial meats
winged open: yellow-
fleshed, black and gray
around the tough
adductor? It hurts
to imagine it, regardless
of the harvester’s
denials, swiveling
his knife to make
the incision: one
dull cyst nicked
from the oyster’s
mantle—its thread of red
gland no bigger
than a seed
of trout roe—pressed
inside this mussel’s
tendered flesh.
Both hosts eased
open with a knife
(as if anything
could be said to be eased
with a knife):
so that one pearl
after another can be
harvested, polished,
added to others
until a single rope is strung
on silk. Linked
by what you think
is pain. Nothing
could be so roughly
handled and yet feel
so little, your pity
turned into part of this
production: you
with your small,
four-chambered heart,
shyness, hungers, envy: what
in you could be so precious
you would cleave
another to keep it
close? Imagine
the weeks it takes to wind
nacre over the red
seed placed at another
heart’s mantle. The mussel
become what no one
wants to:
vessel, caisson, wounded
into making us
the thing we want
to call beautiful.
A PEACOCK IN A CAGE
shaking out its corona of tail feathers is like light
glowing in a bulb, a man
dancing inside an elevator: the space
too small to quite contain him, yet
contain him it does; the way a cloud
keeps some portion of the sea inside it or a box
encloses air, encloses also
the philosophical cat both dead and alive
inside it. The way a car inhales the gas
containing bones of dissolved dinosaurs
and the cheese breeds mold to heal the cut that holds
the hurt cradled inside the body, the blood
thick with the trace of all things
we might yet express or become, such as
the mathlete or music lover, who holds first
one note and then the next inside her ear.
We try to pin the mind’s attention to the task at hand
though the mind can sometimes falter, the way
a tongue sometimes cannot rein in the word
whose meaning may escape it, may be captured
so perfectly within its syllables for once
the desire/the surprise/the distaste churn
palpably when uttered; just as the parent’s past churns
inside the child’s future or the identity of the stranger
hides inside the mundane title with which
we greet him. There are lies we clasp to ourselves
upon waking, truths with which we worry
ourselves to sleep, dreams memory struggles
to capture in the retelling: only the ends remain
in which the building crumbles back to dust
or the mother steps, naked, out of her unzipped skirt:
an image that bears the seed of future therapy.
One book contains at least a dozen others, the scarlet
bitterness of its pith conceals the sweetness
of the mangosteen and, when saddest, we suspect everyone
embraces someone else, though many don’t.
We think a woman shelters a house, husband and a child
inside her, that a man might accommodate
no one else. The party can hold its liquor
only so long, as we can maintain faith that requires us
to keep two contradictions alive at once, like day
and night tucked into the same sunset or the sudden
hatreds ignited by love: the patience
with which we hold still for the camera, believing
it will shore up time, and knowing it won’t.
AT THE FISHHOUSES
And the black water under the boats with their pools
of bilge rainbowed out like rinds
of steak fat, the salt thick
in my nostrils, but pleasant, too: details
I still keep from Bishop’s poem, everything
else about it lost. At the docks,
I watched my friend slip
in her rubber boots; the wide, wet planks
glossy with mosses. You must walk
duck-footed to get to the boats, the black-and-orange