Narcolepsy
I am standing naked in an unfamiliar room,
fingering the umbilicus of an unfamiliar phone.
Sunlight pours through parted curtains,
not my curtains. A breeze pricks my scalp.
The voice says, "... sorry to inform you
that your husband of seventeen years...", and
sleep washes over me, oh the busyness of it all.
I don't even ask how it happened, or whether he suffered in the end.
Then memory reels me in:
something about the beach-- sandbuckets, starfish, yes, and
something else. What became of the child, our little girl?
The voice on the other side is silent. Again,
sleep washes over me. As I rise to the surface, my daughter,
she recedes. I cannot imagine her name.
II: Running by the Schuylkill
My daughter skates faster than I will ever run.
I struggle to keep her in my line of sight
as she strokes past the boathouses.
Men my own age follow her with their eyes.
They get between us on their seven-hundred-dollar bikes--
"On your left, lady." I accelerate past the ache
bubbling between my ribs; still, when the river bends
they're gone. Nobody but me on this stretch of gravel.
Up from the face of the water rises an orange swallowtail,
drawn, I have heard, to the salt of human sweat. Nobody but me
sees, nor adjusts her observation in the next elapsing second:
of course it was no butterfly, but last year's ragged, wind-tossed leaf.
The river twists again, and I see my daughter's t-shirt
flashing in the sunlight. So far away she could be anybody.
III: The Moveable Alphabet
WUN IS AS STRAT AND AS BYUTFUL AS A RIVR
All afternoon she struggled on her striped mat: red
consonants, blue vowels (small l was missing
from the box, and so she chose capital I: blue
and straight, and beautiful.) But the big kids laughed
when she shouted her poem from the back of the van:
the river is crooked, little sister, the river is brown as mud.
That night as I was driving alone by the water,
sleep washed over me again and I understood the van was sliding,
irresistibly, down the riverbank. It was so dark. It was so familiar,
how the van slaps the surface, almost floats. A delicious hesitation,
like the squirt of fire at your birthing. Then a slow trickle,
scented like the night-blooming hibiscus. The unimaginable
is as ordinary as the beat of moths upon your cheek, as the beat of your heart.