let the world spin as it spins

Eat the last cookies in the box.
Wear the same pair of jeans two
weeks in a row. See the orchid die, leaf
by leaf. Wipe the countertop carelessly,
so it’s sticky as spit the next time
you lean on your elbows wondering
what’s for dinner. Watch hours
of television. Call for pizza, for Chinese,
for the cable company to give you even
more channels. Drive by the gym
without skipping a beat. Wash your hair only
when it starts wilt, when the mirror
produces someone who doesn’t look like she wants
to get laid. Think about sex constantly.
Order cocktails. Play pool. Spend your money
on a massage, on t-shirts from the warehouse sale,
on inflation-priced bagels from the café down the street.
Ignore the obvious fact that the sheets
need changing. Occupy your bed gratuitously.
When you’re done reading for the night,
flop the pages open, straining the jacket.
Allow the avocados to ripen beyond repair.
Stain the kitchen sink with grape stems,
mango peels, olive pits with the meat
still clinging. Use vast quantities of paper towels
for a simple spill of water.
Lavish attention on the minute landscape
between your eyebrows.
Lose time. Ditch the mail into the bulging
plastic bag near your desk. Almost mistake it
for trash. Abandon the task of fixing
the dresser drawer. Turn your car
into a wastebasket.

And when it comes, fall with extravagant
ugliness. Grieve noisily into the balls of your fists.
Push your heels against the carpet, your chest squirming.
Feel the walls of the house vibrate with your pain.
Make pockmarks of your heart.
Collapse if you have to. It is like this.
The world spins as it spins.
No one knows,
even though we all know
this is between
you and you alone.
So yield. Commit your entire body.
Recognize your own astonishing anguish.
Tear it from your skin like a wolf
eviscerates her trapped leg. Shriek like
the downed bird you are.
Invest wholly in your damage.
Lap up each tumescent despair. Swallow
the pinbones of your loss. Caress
every razor edge of not enough. Gift yourself
long, bruising hours of hopelessness.
The world spins as it spins.
Your life is on that same axis,
half shadow, half radiance
and turning, always turning.

what brings you to the next morning

Maybe someone sang you to sleep.
Or there was a blackout, and you couldn’t articulate
the hand in front of you.
Maybe the bedroom floor was a deserted beach,
your house a moonscape of solitude.
Or clothes had spilled like a rude volcano,
wine glasses from dinner were scattered
on the coffee table and stained with lipstick,
still holding a thimbleful of revelry.

It could have been one of those nights you needed something
you couldn’t name, a close-knit warmth, a Kleenex,
moisturizer, a lullaby cradling your eyelids.
Or else you were claustrophobic from attention,
the hairs on your arm standing on edge, rebellious,
your body tired of life under a microscope
and something of you desperate for escape,
anonymity, a Yosemite field in the thick of winter,
some carcass of a campsite where you could start again,
build your own small, unseen fire.
Maybe you were stranded in between, your heart caught
on some fishing line, half of you wanting a kitchen stool
to lean against, the other half wildly unfamiliar with the act
of staying still.

What I want to know
is what brings you to the next morning.
How you open one sleepy eye after the other,
part the Red Sea of your comfort and let the air,
graceless and obstinate, pull you into the day.
How you accept the hand that may offer either feather
or thistle. You ask for nothing, not a promise
or a warning or a little party celebrating your entrance,
and instead you heave your weariness from the room,
gather your limbs to the center, and rise.

Tell me what keeps you from plummeting backward.
Tell me on what hidden plume of air you allow yourself
that slim caesura of trust.
Tell me the story of your great impossible hope.
Tell me how your face tilts,
squinting for light.

the sacrifice

I count myself lucky. It was just a few bad cells
threatening an inch-sized plot in the center of my forehead.
I did not run screaming as the roof of the house
I had built with my own hands came plummeting.
I did not watch my mother or daughter disappear
under the rubble. I did not lose a limb, or a life.
Hunger did not set in, the searing in the belly
driving me toward thiefdom. I did not have to wait
for the sky to drop cargoloads of dried beans.
I did not lose my shoes in the furious race
toward water. I did not find myself sitting
in the same row with a stranger who would,
in the name of martyrdom, destroy an entire busload
with a single detonation. I was not a soldier
patrolling a line in the sand on his first deployment,
fingers skittish on the trigger. I was not an orphan
raising siblings in a brutal tent city. I was not
that tent city, teeming with desperate acts of simple survival.
I was not held at knifepoint and robbed of my innocence.
I was not trampled in the heat of hysteria.
I was not sent to my death because of the God I prayed to.

No, I lay there, trusting of the hand slicing into me,
the scalpel so precise it would leave only a trace of itself
after the bleeding stopped and the stitches woven through.
In a week, I would tell the story of the operating table
like an offbeat joke. I would barely remember the trickle of blood
at my temple, the tug at my flesh. The debauched cells
I will have surrendered to the lab and I don’t suppose I will ache
for their return. I will think not of this as a sacrifice,
will forget the temporary frailty of my body to manage
its dissidents, will go on about my business with the same alacrity
and cheerful ignorance I have greeted every other day of my life.

But for now, with the sutures still embedded,
a fresh bandage I fashioned this morning,
and rectangles of tape holding the wound closed,
I am in that rubble. My boots shifty on the sand,
eyes scanning the clouds for the big planes
to come in with reinforcements.
I am sitting on that bus, doing my best to keep track
of who’s climbing the steps and what they’re carrying.
I am keeping a close watch on my water supply,
listening for sinister footsteps behind me,
praying to a busy God for a scrap of salvation,
everything in me clinging to the uncertain, inexplicable fact
of living.