The Beauty (2 page)

Acknowledgments

A Note About the Author

Other Books by This Author

A man reaches close

and lifts a quarter

from inside a girl’s ear,

from her hands takes a dove

she didn’t know was there.

Which amazes more,

you may wonder:

the quarter’s serrated murmur

against the thumb

or the dove’s knuckled silence?

That he found them,

or that she never had,

or that in Portugal,

this same half-stopped moment,

it’s almost dawn,

and a woman in a wheelchair

is singing a fado

that puts every life in the room

on one pan of a scale,

itself on the other,

and the copper bowls balance.

My skeleton,

who once ached

with your own growing larger,

are now,

each year

imperceptibly smaller,

lighter,

absorbed by your own

concentration.

When I danced,

you danced.

When you broke,

I.

And so it was lying down,

walking,

climbing the tiring stairs.

Your jaws. My bread.

Someday you,

what is left of you,

will be flensed of this marriage.

Angular wristbone’s arthritis,

cracked harp of rib cage,

blunt of heel,

opened bowl of the skull,

twin platters of pelvis—

each of you will leave me behind,

at last serene.

What did I know of your days,

your nights,

I who held you all my life

inside my hands

and thought they were empty?

You who held me all your life

in your hands

as a new mother holds

her own unblanketed child,

not thinking at all.

They have discovered, they say,

the protein of itch—

natriuretic polypeptide b—

and that it travels its own distinct pathway

inside my spine.

As do pain, pleasure, and heat.

A body it seems is a highway,

a cloverleaf crossing

well built, well traversed.

Some of me going north, some going south.

Ninety percent of my cells, they have discovered,

are not my own person,

they are other beings inside me.

As ninety-six percent of my life is not my life.

Yet I, they say, am they—

my bacteria and yeasts,

my father and mother,

grandparents, lovers,

my drivers talking on cell phones,

my subways and bridges,

my thieves, my police

who chase my self night and day.

My proteins, apparently also me,

fold the shirts.

I find in this crowded metropolis

a quiet corner,

where I build of not-me Lego blocks

a bench,

pigeons, a sandwich

of rye bread, mustard, and cheese.

It is me and is not,

the hunger

that makes the sandwich good.

It is not me then is,

the sandwich—

a mystery neither of us

can fold, unfold, or consume.

I say I

&

a small mosquito drinks from my tongue

but many say we and hear I

say you or he and

hear I

what can we do with this problem

a bowl held in both hands

cannot be filled by its holder

x
, says the blue whale

x
, say the krill

solve for
y
, says the ocean, then multiply by existence

the feet of an ant make their own sound on the earth

ice is astonished by water

a person misreads

delirium as delphinium

and falls into

a blueness sleepy as beauty when sneezing