Praises from a Dark Mouth

Beyond the AIDS Hospice (for John)

Even as it rains your body burns to a cinder;

the spirit, shocked by fire, leaps from your chest.

It flies past the laden clouds, takes up its new post:

tour guide to heaven, showing men suddenly fat again, their new home.

To the Man Who Tends My Grandmother’s Grave

I give you thanks for knowing the ways of the living, how it is important for my mother to know her mother has not been forgotten: last week a son brought three faux flowers, wept like a child over her grave; the week before Mrs. B, on her way to visit her daughter cut down by sugar, stopped for a brief chat, laughing like old times. I give you thanks for the plot of grass, perpetually green in a place famous for water lock-offs and parched earth. I give you thanks for stooping to Brillo polish her silver tombstone so we see ourselves in the sheen. I give you thanks for carrying the red dirt from all these graves into your house each night, showing your children that we are all half spirit, composites of the living and the dead. I give you thanks for taking the crumpled bills, small payment for back-breaking work in the sun, with a smile, even when this exchange is infrequent like the rain here. I give you thanks for knowing the slight bend of a body carrying grief, the quiet before flood. Last Sunday we came with my father to visit his brother freshly laid in the earth, another grave for you to tend; we thought he was handling it well, he could drive us home. Quickly you ushered me over, “Him can’t drive. Him soon bruk down bad, bad.” My mother drove, my father became the water within him. And you who tend these graves, may your death find you among familiar faces, grateful recipients of your tending.

The Sea

I am thinking about the sea. I am remembering a friend who fell into the water and the propeller tore open her arm. We sat helpless on the boat while the sea turned to red. We were only twelve. She insisted I follow her into the emergency room. When the doctor removed the towel and I saw the muscles in her arm, like pink worms piled on a butcher’s block, I fainted. The taste of the sugar and water is still fresh in my mouth. The guilt I felt for fainting, for not being the one who fell off, for not saving her mid-fall is still raw. Some nights it sits on the bed beside me. I remember my parents’ faces as they handed her over to her parents when we got back into town. For our entire eighth grade I could not look at her long arms. I could not look at her face. Years later when I looked at the scar on her arm, a curdled mass of flesh from under armpit to elbow I thought, This is what ruin looks like. My father took my sister and me out on the boat the following weekend. He said we needed to conquer our fear. My mother stood at the water’s edge and cried. My father made us steer the boat. He made us go fast. He took our hands and pushed them against the tide; the water was blood beneath my fingernails. My mother did not speak to him for weeks. He could not give us back what the sea had taken. My friend grew shorter with each passing year. She crawled into that scar. She did not take me with her. I am thinking about the sea, how deceptive blue is, how thirsty I have been.

Again

August.

Beneath yards of white cotton a fruit ripens in the heat.

You roll it on your tongue, tug at it, find it fit to eat.

You wipe the sweat from your brow; my mouth receives it as rain.

Each mouthful melts the small stone he left to grow in my throat.

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