January 9th: Cardiac Arrest
The first time I ever drew a nude I remember her
blue veined wrists--maybe because we began
at the obvious hip--her simple curve and shape
the way she’s a landscape all her own, of mown
hayfields and roads coming up to them though only
this time of year, after the hay’s made,
and a palm to a palm enough of praying a few days
of no rain. One year, late, maybe just
this side of safe enough to bale and take up
that temporary road, a cloud hung us back a mile
or so and the wind waited and nobody moved.
The truck was full and idle and the fumes stood still.
It was an eclipse of the sun though none of us knew
and we, jaw-awed fought for the best view, climbing
the top of the wheel-well, the top of the hay, dust
and chaff slapped away…even the flies were quiet.
And Old Man Berry, a worker not a talker, gave us each
a turn with the green welding glass. When he held it out
to me his naked white wrist was throbbing hard,
ba-blue, ba-blue, ba-blue, and I took the rest
of the afternoon with him and the cool thermos water,
day old biscuits. We didn’t talk at all and the raw
dark absorbed us while we passed that glass back
and forth back and forth and his breathing calmed
and his blood pulled back to pace. We sat easy,
quiet, still in the shaved hay, shadowless free. He thanked
me. To see him in her naked wrist, he’s long dead
now, was it maybe in the way she sat and then without
seeming to move at all, how she shifted her hips
to reposition? Like that dark afternoon..We must've moved, bones
skin, we must’ve. I can’t remember an ache or even going
home. It was the old man and the sun closing up
early just after two, like it had tsomeplace else to be,
like the earth knew and forgot and kept on, or, more,
couldn’t bring itself to stop spinning when she, after
all that cover-up, started getting comfortable again, pulling
cloud by cloud on a clear day, taking off the veil,
the snood-blue veil, an old man’s, a nude woman’s wrist,
a coming back to life sky.
No comments:
Post a Comment