Triggers: Still Reading Your Books

Triggers:
Still Reading Your Books

I went ahead and had the children,

the life of ease and faithfulness, the

palm and the breast, every millimeter of delight in the body,

took it all without you as if

in taking it after all I could most

honor you.

                                                Cambridge Elegy

                                                Sharon Olds

Reading through you

            line by line spine by spine

binding after binding

it’s quick sometimes like a smear

on his cuff after he’d stuffed

it all right in
to the elbow

into the front of my pants

in the kitchen while the raw

wings and legs and thighs

spread their wide plucked out lives
clean as new skin

in the roasting pan.

Almost free of this life,

this is their one final leap,

to be eaten after they’re laid

down, eaten now because

they’d missed the egg stage,

the shitty in the nest and cooling

off stage and risking it, (she I’m saying)

because there’d been foxes

and coons in the henhouse. It's
the last straw, it will see her
gone after he rolled

over in bed and grasped that soap

opera cliché of empty

sheets: there is nothing left

to do but pull them up

to his mouth and nose and breathe.

It’s fresh clean and bleach

and she’s free as bubbles

and sunshine.

When your books finally came

                to me like you said they would

                I was surprised at how few

                there were because I’d remembered

                a whole library of spines

                carefully organized by theme

                on the shelves you’d built

                that were so sturdy

                they could have been the bed

                we’d made to love and wrecked

                if we had ever made a bed to love and wreck.

                But it wasn’t like that for us--

                two married people who’d sworn other aliances:

                                you to a lovely (after the first harpy

                                                but the sex was great you’d said

                                                after you’d known me for years,

                                                anytime I wanted a piece

                                                of ass…and you apologized

                                                like you wanted me to see

                                                the gallant you you’d become

                                                but I could guess and I did but

                                                tenderly at first, the way a nurse

                                                would move an elbow with

                                                the same curtesy as she would

                                                your testicles after your bath

                                                after your first stroke

                                me to a boy really (a house cat you’d called

                                                him) (but not my first boy

                                                and the sex with him was dirty was

                                                a cesspool I’d said after I’d known you

                                                for years and after that I could tell

                                                you wanted to

                                                show me it wasn’t all like thighs

                                                spread wider than the sky

                                                his flight coming in but deliberately

            changing course without telling me

            and for a while your quiet  

                                (because I’d said I was days
                                alone in my room, there was a lot

                                of blood and shit

        like that and after that…well)

was the only balm I would have

needed to get me to walk straight

again if you’d been there then---

So now when I’m reading 

                your copy of Sharon Old’s The Gold

                Cell I notice your highlights and those

                you want to come back to later on and they’re

                the poems that remember

                Firsts:      First Boyfriend

                                First Sex

                                First Love

                And now, because I know more

                about sex and dying and find it appropriate

                                an Elegy.

After all, where else is there to land

                after you fall, after the stars go out

                after they’ve been stirred from the bottom

                of their cell and played

                up and up and up and maybe

                they won’t make it maybe

                they stand at the bottom of those stairs

                like you did

                and feel the bottom rise up

                and the top fall down

                and the squeeze of the veins

                and the quickening  

                and the ecstasy after all these

                                celibate years

                coming alive while all you can do now

                                is die.

And these few books I keep repeat us

                somehow, even after your ten years gone:

                                every time I open one I smell:

                                                your mouth after three whiskeys and a big cigar

                                                the breakfast you cooked for me

                                                when I told you about the repeated sodomies

                                                and the pine tree sweat falling on us

                                                while we walk and walk deeper and deeper

                                                we walk.