Night: scratching or gnawing rises from the juncture
of wall and floor. This building’s old, keeps me up
with its resident hungers. By morning who knows
what to blame? The numbness blooms in two
directions, up and down my spine, nape to tail.
Women are tuning forks, a friend says, so I guess
we can assume something’s coming. A parade, maybe,
slide trombones with their foghorn throb, their brass
centrifuge—or end of days, waterspout kicked up in a pond
once so chopped with walleye you could hardly swim.
Back then I thought slipping fishhooks out gently could
get me somewhere with fate—somewhere unharmed.
Soft pressure of thumb at jaw joint, and just like a coin purse
the world would pop open for me, would jangle with
reciprocal silver. Even if gut-hooked: needlenose pliers
in through a gill, counterintuitive twist. A kind of love.
For Grandmother’s essential tremor, the doctor urged
vodka gimlets, a therapy I found both tender and lazy.
Unambitious. I can’t help picturing him on a sunfish,
tanning beside his elongated life partner. But so slim,
really, the chances any of us make it past the bull sharks
and what would it mean if we did? My daughter
returns from jumping rope with cheeks pink as
minced watermelon. She finds me sobbing, the wall
that holds me sprouting pale horsehair. Another friend
burying another child. 19. Motorcycle. What purpose, I
ask, does it serve the whale to breach, to slap the sickly
gray glass surfaces of any ocean, to fragment the finite
sugar of its 400-lb. heart? Darwin distracts us: fit, fit,
fittest, his thrust as incessant as teeth crumbling a wall
into a hole. We should want that whale to make it all the way
to magnetic north. All the way. I might have begun this
poem by complaining, but truly, I side with the mouse.