This Small Vacancy

This Small Vacancy

for the little girl in Elizabeth

Bishop

It’s a phrase I never liked much and never trusted

it’s this is this and what’s what because xyz: she’s

an orphan now and unwanted, she’s shuffed from

aunt to aunt she’s mostly unloved by all

of them except maybe in Nova Scotia, those who take her

in the way suffering souls take suffering souls

in: they look at the fold, like an old and cozy dog

by the woodstove, in the blanket on the bed, a roll

in the slop and another roll.  I remember myself

how in low light I used to with one eye

shut rise up and look over the length of it

all and to the foot of my bed and see the iron

spiles plummet down below the mattress, how

beneath the window and if the moon was just so

the opposite wall would be a castle and a doll

would be the girl in the tower and she’d creep

to the space between and look back at me, sweet

and angry, growling under her gills (my father’s

expression) like all trapped things do before they

die alive in their skin alive in their eyes,

the last of them to go to milk, to die, and how the skin

near to them is gently severed and in the end

empty, in the end up on some plinth or in a dusty

bucket in the closet at the crazy aunt’s.  Maybe the girl

finds it there later, tipped and vacant, and she lifts

it to her cheek, ermine or baby beaver or kit gone

missing and though no one can tell her why her throat

being choked with unsayable phrases ( they’d

told her about her loony mother her suffering heart-

broke father and given her another (the third

that day) enema) she begins to go motor smooth, she knows

finding this small vacancy wasn’t chance and

wasn’t accident.  One eye is lost forever maybe

in another house.  The remaining one is scratched

and matte flat.  Remember that.  Remember that she tells her-

self when she puts it back how it ended up shoved

from pillar to post--come all the way from Nova Scotia

where it was alive before it was trapped,

laid plain, stuffed, a puppet and trophy for only as long

as showing got prophet, money or brave praise:  Careful:

don’t end up like your mother crazy in the bin

the door shut and locked behind her forever and ever and ever.

No, I never liked it must or ever trusted it, that phrase ended up.  As if

all the successes that follow one fall somehow didn’t make it

on the ledger.  As though totals were the only score left

standing or breathing.  But even those fade, brilliantly, maybe

especially, the book being closed and all.