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for Sara Lynn Gilsdorf, 1940-1997
1.
So into that hole of not-knowing
I throw my discount hope:
if because I never grasped you,
my hands still rope-burned and red,
don't blame me for needing to bow
down, deify your feet.
2.
While the wall of the aneurysm stretched
thinner and weaker than the rest of the artery wall,
I came up with a new arrangement:
what I couldn't have I was not denied.
No. I was holding out. Something better
would arrive. My idea of you dilates l
ike a balloon. Me who decides.
3.
The subjects you encompass:
Geography and the slaughterhouse.
Left side (like beef), right hemisphere (a globe),
your scattered zones and by-products
I assemble into the whole of my making,
not true, not you, perhaps, but mine.
You seem inside my screening room
complete-lights up, all maudlin,
a trace of chemical aftertaste.
4.
It's the imagination that's engaging,
more real than the material Mom.
So that it's not entirely you I'm asking,
"Remember, our basement dirt floor?
Though frozen, the ideal swordfish
rotting down there, all winter the apple cider
we'd kept sharpening into vinegar?"
5.
And how could you live up to the mother
I never had-if "had" the right idea? Do sons
"have" mothers, mothers "have" sons?
Possess, inhabit, reflect against?
I'd rather grapple with the self-diagnostic self,
interrogate who I constructed, instead
of asking the higher questions, higher
than "head of the pin" stuff: happiness,
why your body abandoned you like a husband.
6.
Not so much the hole, the unearthed
space, the opening in the matter
that should have been you: I'm more fascinated
by the matter removed, that mound of rubble,
that's a history lesson in New Hampshire soil,
the rocks, bits, chalky stuff, the little mountain
beside the hole that never fits back,
nothing fills with the same pressure and layers,
the same sedimentary evidence: you layered up,
over, inside me as if sand, years of sand and weight.
7.
8.
Arbitrary, going all the way to ten.
Why not end here? What's so perfect?
9.
The time I've allotted: a drained bath.
A train reaching its long arm towards Paris.
The notebook reduced after each word:
grids like rifle sites, open space gone.
10.
What isn't there can't be had-
I never learned. But it presses,
nonetheless, kicks through barn doors
more so than the thing endured.
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