Kettering

Gagging bedside flowers, turning on her, turning on her as she lies there with her hands on her stomach. Gagging and red, with puckered, sidestreet lips, red and snapping, they are coy and winking, like catcalls. They make her sick. She turns over on her side. She is always sick. She sometimes dreams about origami, and folding it, and the geometric, stately swans that she creates and then burns with matches, one by one. The swans tuck their heads into their breasts, sigh ash. Her bones hurt. They grind and shriek. When she doesn't move, they hurt – when she moves, they grind like mortars and pestels, and hurt even worse. It is a deep, core pain, from the center, from her very middle. She lies in her bed and coughs ash from the burnt paper swans and sounds out the name of the cancer that eats her. That tastes her. Teethes on her.

It blooms in her. It blooms and weighs her down, lead sinker, red sinkers, like the bedside tulips, blowing her kisses, blowing her stale, insincere wishes of good health.

o

You talk interminably. You talk to fill the silence. You talk for me and you talk for the doctors and you drink water out of a paper cup on the bedside table, by the tulips you brought me, to keep me company, like little mewling housecats. At first, there was nothing to say. Now, I cannot get you to shut up. You talk to me about how it is spring again, how the sink is broken, how it is very lonely in your bed at night, in the middle of the night, when it is most lonely. This hospital I am in is merely a vacation; your words, postcards from far away. The doctors told me you would react like this. I hate, hate, hate how we can be so easily predicted. How suffering can be reduced to a few easy steps. How you follow the steps as if you were assembling a dresser or a cupboard, when all you are building is a cage. A cage for me, a cage for your love, one that I will never leave, one that I must leave and there is nothing, nothing you can do about it.

Hold my hand.

Hold my hand and shut up, please, or I will burst.

o

French Quarter – 1999

– laughed and he sat down beside her on the street corner. They held hands. They watched as the band wove under the verandas and iron work galleries, past the colonnades, the sousaphones mooching, the trumpets squawking and muted, and the clarinetists with their long faces, their instruments hiding and sighing, like secret admirers. The saxophones rooting, great brass stems, holding their notes at the bottom of their curves like pelicans. The hanging flowers were throwing themselves overboard, the streetlights bending and sucking in, lightheaded, like corseted ladies.

Dusk came. She whispered in his ear that she was pregnant and he leapt to his feet and kicked off his shoes and chased after the band whooping and singng and she laughed and followed and they ran all the way to the banks of the Mississippi where they laid in each other's arms and watched the barges floating on the dark waters. His skin was tacky from the humidity. Her hair was redder than he'd ever seen it before. He started to talk, but –

o

I water the tulips, bobbing and talkative as verbs. She stares at the ceiling. Her face seems to be one size too small today, her mouth husked open, her eyes overlarge and purple, her lips thin, white. Her breath comes out soft, rustling, like pages of sheet music turning in an orchestra. Chest rising and falling. She is small, skeletal, her skin old lace, put away, worn once. I sit down beside her. She offers me her hand. I hold it. The reedy flutes of her bones shift around in the sack of her hand.

“How are you doing, hon?”

She turns her head and smiles a thin, counterfeit smile. “Would like it on a pain scale, or were you just making conversation?”

“Just talk.”

She nods.

“Okay.”

“Picked those tulips from the garden. The ones we planted outside the window. They're so big already and we're not even halfway through April.”

She looks out the window. There is a birch tree outside her window. I'm glad of that. She used to peel the birch skin off the tree in our front yard and write haikus on leaflets and she would burn them, and said that that was the only way to write a haiku. Given breath for a few moments, an inky heartbeat, and then sent back to where it came from. She's all about cycles. The coming, the going. Trade offs, substitutions, breathing in, breathing out. The birch bark on this tree peels and curls and flutters, like ninety-five theses nailed to a church door.

The tulips shimmy in their jazz halls.

“So any news from the doc?”

“Nope.”

“No news is good news.”

She stares at the ceiling. Her hand is cold and dry in mine, and dead.

“Had to call the plumber today. The kitchen sink smelled like hell. He was pretty – ”

She squeezes my hand and holds it there. I shut up. I look away. The lights are raw, irritated, like sore throats.

“Don't talk to me like this,” she says.

o

Hanes, Oregon – 2000

– in a restaurant bathroom. The great tubas of pain, wrapped around her stomach, the blood, the blood, the stall floor was slippery with it. She had taken her pants off. She groaned and held onto the handicap rail and cried for help and there was soft music playing on the overhead speakers. It was too early – far too early. Three, four months in. She saw an ultrasound of it on Tuesday. Large, martian head, polyped fists, its skin transparent and thoughtful, touching softly at her belly, unsure, like the kiss of a snail. In the nautilus of her belly, billowy, attatched, like a thought balloon.

It came out. He, she, it. It was small and shriveled, strange fruit. Wrinkled, pocketed face. She cried more for its death then from the pain. She cried in the blood, over the toilet seat, the toilet paper lapping it up, lapping it up thirstily. She fought for control over herself. It took a while to get her chest to stop heaving. She wiped away her tears with the back of her hand. In a few moments, she was not angry any more. This was just the nature of things. Something is taken, something is given back. Blood ran in the tile grout. She pulled herself up shakily and wraps the miscarried fetus in toilet paper and –

o

You insist on taking a walk. You insist on taking a walk down through the hayfields and cotton fields, the tips of the crinkled cottonballs a delicate wedding lace and the crabapple trees leaning over the dirt road, its fruit sour with a kind of taste that pulls your mouth in on itself from all directions. The crabapples leave my stomach heavy and grumbling. Our neighbor Mr. Ashley's old red truck is still outside the clapboard barn of his, with great cankers of peeling rust, like peeling scabs. Ashley's old grain silo wheezes and now bends at the middle. There are no cows in the field. This place has changed. You hold my hand as I look at everything that's changed. It has changed for me. It has changed with me. I pick up a blade of grass and crush it in my hands. It is hard to crush it. It feels as if I am crushing one of my own bones.

Gnats hang in the late afternoon air like apostrophes, the poppies that Mr. Ashley keeps whisper their evening monologues, tonguing the air like french kissers. A french kiss. I look at you. You look at me. My mouth tastes of ash and I ask you if you want to walk down to the pond in the hayfarm. You nod and smile. You are pleased with my strength (you take it as a sign of improvement), but we still walk slowly, and Mr. Ashley's old black Labrador follows a little ahead of us. You lead me like an old woman. I feel like an old woman. My insides are all tin and powder and heirlooms. I still have the hospital band around my wrist – a shackle, a manacle. We stop at the pond and the dog wades in to its chest and bullfrogs plop into the pond invisibly at our arrival and the lilies are split open by the sun and by the spring like cut throats.

You are quiet. We stand. I want you to talk now. I hate being here. I hate how these lilies are growing, and how the hayfarm is dying. I hate the taste of crabapples. What a useless, silly fruit. You ask me if anything is wrong – I am crying. I shake myself from you. I am heavy and full of nothing, like sleep breath. I kneel.

Hold my hand.

No.

Stay away.

Please stay away.

If you touch me I will shatter. If you touch me I will burn – a haiku written on birch.

Hold me. For god's sake, hold me until I go.

o

steeple of dead bones –

she fears the tulips and their

endless get-well-soons.

o

Hanes, Oregon – 2000

– liked watching the leaves fall, because it meant starting over, and for their veined, sickly beauty. It meant that in a few more months the new leaves would begin to appear, small and fluttering, like grace notes, and the bees would appear in their tabernacles and she liked the bees, too, as they broke from their winter jelly and preened their wings and began the ceremony of dance and gathering, without teachers, without parents, beginning anew, and the queen rising, rising like a death toll.

He couldn't understand her obsession with cycles, her preoccupation with the give and the take. Hers was a religion of flow. How does the sunlight get into the belly of tiger? How does the death of a predator lead to the death of the plant-eaters? She liked to keep track of statistics of death and birth. She often reminded him that there were four births and two deaths in every second of every day.

They did not talk about the miscarriage. They never talked about it. Two days later, they planted a birch tree in the front yard, next to the poppies, floating on their thin stems, loud and rude, like the cries of a newborn in the middle of the night. When she thought about the child she might have had, she would go outside and –

o

I don't bring flowers anymore. I stopped when I found the last bunch in the trashcan a week ago, heartbroken and lipless. The room is very stark and bleak without them. She is very stark and bleak. Her bones rattle under her skin. She is asleep for the most part, her eyes rimmed with dreams and drugs and I sit by the bed and I talk to her when she sleeps and I am quiet when she is awake. She has been writing haikus on her arms and legs, for lack of birchbark. They crawl and weep in the lines and wrinkles of her prematurely aging body.

On her left wrist:

The mountain waits in

servitude. She climbs to the

top and releases him.

On the inside of her thigh:

tin-bell lilacs hush

and moths browse as she feels the

first springstorm droplet.

On her forearm:

winter birchbark peels

like old, youthful promises –

remorse cools on tongues.

She waits for them to be burned. The nurses' heads bob in like candleflames. I kiss her on the hand, where there is a haiku about being afraid, and she stirs.

o

I am very calm, and without assumptions. The light from the day fringes the curtains like words on the tip of a tongue. In the center of my being there is a blueness, where I can put all of my pain and my bitterness. A blueness that sinks and paralyzes. A blueness that comes and comes and comes and is especially strong when you hold my hand. The bedsheets are a flat tornado country and the morphine in my blood is useless and thick as sap. I turn my head to you. You suggest a smile. A very small and rationed smile, because all of your other smiles have not been returned. You look very tired. You are papery and worn. You have lines in your forehead. Your smile reaches me through the darkness, like a radio transmission through space. A little feeler of light. An ant of illumination.

I smile back.

You wipe the tear on my cheek away with your thumb, which washes away the haiku I wrote about never being able to properly express yourself. I ask you if you could bring some tulips next time, and to put them on my bedside table, where I can look at them. Where they can toss and turn in their litters, spindly and puckering up, like little girls applying their mother's lipstick.

You tell me that you will get them as soon as possible.

I cry for the ones I threw away.

The blueness grows larger.

My eyelids are very heavy.

I wonder what the names are of the four children who are born in this second, and whether they are girls or boys and for a fraction of this second I can see each of their lives stretching on and on and on, and I wonder if the person dying with me knows me in this moment as well as I know them.

o

– and she looked out the window and wondered about the ache in her bones. He kissed her on the forehead and wished her a good morning. She could see the first vestiges of spring that day, in the way that –