Portrait: Parsing My Wife As Lookout Creek
My wife sits, wipes, stands, zips, forgets to flush.
Rushing,
the river’s every agenda. We pull at our clothing,
all day, humans, us,
all of us.
Try not to touch it.
I stand at the mirror, tuck a tail, a tag, tug a collar, flinch.
What face is that?
Dry
outside, there are pines pushing against every reflecting sky
in their own grim time.
My mother, tough one, British stiff. Sit up straight. Excuse
you. That’s a dessert spoon.
Butler’s fool,
ambassador for a childhood of rules. One tough one.
Language gets us in its grip with its little links and latches,
clasps, clamps,
padlocks,
and we’re lost: grappling.
Close your mouth when you chew.
In these river days,
what floats for me to find is the tissue, wet, a red filmy swirl
the symptom of a drifting of cells
alluvial shift
in a body I know.
Do you imagine first the conifer leaves?
Or the buried thread-like roots
deeply reaching for food?
Plunging to touch the hidden skin
of the river.
Dawn’s lazy diffusion of hues lights the children’s
confusion, their breakfast food,
flow
of this river that spews
stripped trunks, a shoe, crescent crust of dead everything,
the ongoing plunge of innard and corpse.
Even my stepdaughter laughs, who for now laughs last,
least.
There’s nothing funny about PMS: period.
My wife,
sure, she blushes, but it’s love like the cat’s torn mouse,
the breast-split wren,
the rejected owl pellet,
her kind of love,
the river’s necessary way of sharing of what she’s composed,
unburdened by grammars, maps, latitudes, rules,
banks.
I am wading
the lava rock and free-stone bed,
the old-growth bole
wedged
and lecturing only by collecting
every drifting thing that the muscle spits up, aggregate of flow,
motion of bundling,
clustered abundance of the rushing’s best refuse.
I steady my step,
pocket a bottle, sift the river with my fingers, sink
into its stunning flood,
touch her every part.
