Requiem for a Rosewood Marimba, and: Topographies, and: Poem Colored with Henna

In the heat wave, says the blind woman, before heavy rains, red ants come inside, curl into pinpoints, and sting like fire. When I lie down, they bite. I spot them with my magnifying glass and pinch them. Flesh-eating ants. Blood-laden flesh is sweet, yes. Wash your eyes with water, these rain-soiled hands ready to blossom.

A girl, not yet sixteen, shot in the chest on thirtieth street.

At the funeral parlor, I moved a rosewood marimba. Memory is a cherrywood or walnut resonance box, color of foyer light. I took apart the marimba, brought it upstairs, then reassembled it in the rehearsal room. Rosewood bars rang with ideal partials and dark fundamentals.

A girl is a rosewood marimba taken apart, rib by rib.

She lay in a casket the color of pale doorskin, not mahogany, as requested. We didn’t know her name. Phoebe X, Maria X. Humming floated among sparse mourners. The blind woman understood, then, how gold bees would compose a paper hive inside a marimba box, notes sprouting fluently on staves as a nameless girl bloomed with music.

Topographies

I. Water Table

Ocean renews the blue wound the way a mesa or table of light enters the blind woman’s window. Even the earth flows like water. One solid body melts another as one, breaks without warning the rootless continents. Avalanches slide to red clay rivers, ice mantles float on an iron core of fissured bodies. Sea glass is the blind woman’s table of iris-colored light. I can’t see the water today, she says, though blue ardor filters me.

II. Desert Sea

The blind woman harbors vision in her body. Light is hued, wine-colored retinal healing. Sand dunes say the moon is a lost eye. It crosses this nervous plain in a nomad’s water vase on the nightside of hills folded in old optic basins, thin sclera for drowned cities, sky more furious than naphtha flowing from vitreous stone.

III. Nocturne Prayer

Petal eye survives a dark mirage in an underground fern grotto, fronds unfurling in darkness, curled sap in an ounce of world. This is the flesh of irises healing. Night air quiets the desert sand. A saguaro says, blooming: Yes, I am limestone dissolved in a glass of rain, ageless.

Poem Colored with Henna

A blind woman flattens her hair with a hot comb and castor oil near an iron stove in a heat wave.

Red henna dye in a box, waves of nausea, vision blurs as she pauses for a drink of water.

Nouveau wave preserves a pincurl after rain while hot weather favors smooth hair, she says.

When I could see, I used to do this every Sunday, she adds, eyes closed. Quiet church mornings

at the window in my bedroom, on a reading seat or in a tiled bath: retinoic acid for weathered skin,

rose tannins as a mild astringent. Ironed cloth of hand-dyed skirts summer orange

to dark brown. Henna cotton fluttered on the ultrasound, baby henna leaf. First marriage.

No pressures of expectations, no anguish or regret, love was a mother’s spoken blessing: Drink deeply as of red wine your good in parceled days. In real life, of course, red wasn’t my natural shade. Now I wake in half-light, says the blind woman. I pray

and the prayer bleeds henna red to black fen, jewelweed touch-me-not

caressed green in a dark roadside ditch yet silver underwater.