Match

Quick to commit, she
        left the oven on, the paper

        too close to the flame,
was “out of town and heart

rent at the loss.” The gas soaked
        rags. The spark in the curtain.

        Your forgotten robe, fire
retardant and rose, swirls

in the gathering ash.
        Stop now.

        The cake will stay uncut, the gifts
wrapped, the ceremony not yet

snapped shut. She runs
        hot wax in a candle, pushing

        the edge, made pliant by heat, until
at last the wax

no longer held back
        spatters onto your hip.

        Then cooling. The scald never as bad
as the girl who, to see in it,

pulled down a pan of boiling oatmeal.
        The moment past tip gives

        its center over
to gravity and you

stand, face raised. Stop now.
        Promises have been made.

        Even light, tightening
its wavelength, can cut. The casual

annual x-ray. She walks
        uncovered to the car. Once the surface

        splits, the inside is irretrievably
open. Everything

burning. All of it.
        Your cells, again, forgotten.

Febrifuge

Hold the phone to your heart.
      Fiber-optic transmission is sign

      and symptom. The pathology is distance—your voice
as light in my ear.

      “The remedy undergoes a violent shaking—succussion—in       solution.

Then dilute. Even in the drug's absence, its vibration

imprints the solvent molecule.” Solve me. That memory given

to the living system.

                                   Endoscopy
and phone lines—
                  both fiber-optic
      —reveal gut and language
jumpy with synapse.

(Light gets under our skin.)

      Succuss me.

(Not yet, my photon, a means to transmute
this vascular mix to impulse and back through slim glass.)

As always,

      illumination. That external space still wider than flesh, though       the syllabic dose transcends.

_____

 

Symptoms come on with the first relaxation into alpha. I wake
with skin tympanic and cardiac
pinch. For better or for worse you may feel
restless, anxious, a cold dry
wind which triggers a sudden
fever's onset. For ovarian pain on the left
and in spring: Lachesis mutus
a venom, pyretic. (She holds

this word and the wire it
travels—hands her sister

the scissors.) A full dose inhibits
nerve function in the heart and speeds red cell death. In dilution
the body is nudged from hot flash, from
the spasmodic period, faint, and
flutter. “Life's lot altered.” When she

draws us out: the severing stroke
      held.

                                   Succuss me.

(You have.)

                                   “Sulfur at one part per 5 x 1011 carries
scent.” (Why not you in my fissures still?)

“Dilute a vial one drop to one hundred over one dozen iterations”: it retains
no double helix. Only a limbic state: semi-solid, harboring in its structure
the electrochemic cast of its smallest loss. Only
memory with which to hold

that shape which could
      cure this.

                                   Solve me.

_____

 

      A salmon at sea knows its home
water at 1 ppm.

Uncontain me, my limbic, we share a skin.

The fiber optic speed of voice converted to light and
      back the cortex gets, but at medullar levels a disparity in
scale and sense. I hear, but no scent of—

      Subdermal, electric, our

interpenetrated cells are stretched to

archipelago by the unyielding
air.   Succuss me.   You have.   Shaken.

      “Fever with a thirst and moist skin.” Atropa
belladonna
dilates the eyes

to brightness, addresses right ovary
pain and loss of voice. The largest will be

undone by its smallest echo, which
      stimulates the same ache as illness

and shows us balance.
      Spin life in. You may

tremble, may know
the percentage of flesh mostly fluid.

Grace That Lies

Each “right” elicits a muddle of left­
footed, switching poses as body
lags brain,
or brain shuts off and leaves
body baffled.

First, second, relevé, plié, sag and soften around positions
deserted for decades. Their bodies, recalling small
ease, folding double-lever
frames off the floor by muscles accustomed to the slump of desk work
into adolescent angles and perimenopause in one pose,
shoulders back, at rest on themselves.

Nothing has passed and a life since they leapt
across a room, formation ragged and grave, driven
by a voice of vague accent urging
higher, longer, faster, wider, reach, reach, reach—
replaced today by a bellow,

Breathe!

and bellylaugh that elates them, sloppily on pointe
straining higher knowing
grace that lies not in wishing
they may one day be
every girl's music
box—Look. Their audience
is a mirror, themselves in arabesque, seagulls, and diva bows, left, right,

the long leg, the rose. No applause but the slap
and brush of thighs, rolls at waists
compressed
for a curtsy, a jiggle of breasts, quick breaths at easy steps.
They are fierce,
sweat-limned,
radiant in what they did not become.