2×4
If the curfew kept lasting, on the fifth day
my mother would certainly run out into the street
and pile her body onto history. I try
to think of that as a cloud, an idea
that lives somewhere in a notebook and not,
for example, her body, her ox-arms,
a desire for bananas, a need for flour.
The story used to go:
You’re in one of the twin towers.
Way up top. Across
is your baby. Between the towers is only
a 2×4, and you know how buildings sway
that high. Do you cross? You’d come back
raw-kneed, or dead, or with your palms
red from the wind and cold.
You don’t consider. You finish your drink.
You say yes. That is how you know
baby is something you care about.
After one thick night considering vertigo
I crossed money off my list. I lost
poetry the second night, and other light things
that don’t stay balanced on the end of a 2×4.
The smell of fresh challah, sweet wine,
and my father’s after-shave on the boat to Newport:
I lost those fast. Butter-heavy pastries, sex.
The ground was littered with them; commuters waded
through the soft things I didn’t care enough about.
There was a gun one night,
with a heavy smell, a curve, a strong
line to it, art and solid:
the things I’d lost, and the future. I thought:
I would cross – I would take it – I would fall.
(In Mid-American Review, Spring 2005)
