Fidelity

Fidelity

When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body

caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines,

the glassy bowing and scraping of my will...

                                                                                Robert Lowell

                                                                                Dolphin

She was the only woman I ever knew

to hover over my illness, to cover and lift

the shades, the blankets, to shine

a flashlight to see if the measles

went down my throat, in my vagina.  I

was fever and wet bed and through it all

I don’t remember my own

mother anywhere near maybe she was busy keeping

all the rest away.  The hand laid

on my sick face was another woman’s

hand and it was rough-honest and guided,

it was scarred with the scars of her own

childrens' fevers and fits of deliriums.  For weeks

in that dark room she was there

when I woke up.  Not my mother.  Your

mother, for all her ferocity I’d know

later on in life, she raised her hand

to my cheeks in a way no one ever had

or ever has, even when the alcoholic
priest blessed me before he went away

to learn to take antabuse.  Today I recreate her

gesture:  to cool the fury or warm the shock

of others and think how God, as a man,

touched mud and made it break open the dark

vaults of blindness, or how his mother,

as a woman, stood burning in thy will be

done and her husband’s dream of falling

rocks, of running for their very lives 

into sweat and desert dust and, ultimately, after

weeks of being battered and unquenched,

this is theirs and my road to loyalty: who holds

the cold compress and hums some wordless

lulliby is, always will be,  the hero of a seven year old.
Who cools the coals of demons with one lip

on top of the other, pursed like a kiss, saying:

shhhhh,                     shhhhhh will have me

forever.  Yes, forever.