Get Up: Today's Date Already Crossed Off, and: What City, What Day, and: They Fly to Me

Get Up: Today's Date Already Crossed Off

The blue plums, sinking slowly into themselves,
kept the black gnats busy: first thickening
then darkening the air. July9: a sweltering city,
where two young women debated silence vs. song
across their desks. Wire baskets of paper.
They read and talked and passed a stapler.

They needed all four eyes when they stepped out
and had less of each other and none of the dark
aromatic room. Crossing nine streets that stretched
across town like centuries on a classroom's
wall-length timeline - red unstoppable arrows
at either end. At either end, July: everyone
had been too warm to wake. In dreams, whatever
they'd been able to touch they'd been able to take.

What City, What Day

I was pushing the gurney
and the doctor walking beside it
kept asking questions of the prone man
who stared back at me as if for help
on a grade school quiz: Who is our
president? What city are you in?
Saints stood like stone lions
on either side of the elevator doors.
Going up, I put one palm
over the man's cheek and ear. He'd
failed the questions. White heat
under my palm as the floors blurred by.

Then the man touched
the doctor's sleeve. Please, he pleaded,
I know people are starving
but don't let them eat me.
I can find the road. I can
get us to the kingdom.

They Fly to Me

The doctors who couldn't remember my name had made a video of my insides, and in the dreamtime playback, a wedding of starlings was underway. Too many vowels in the high-pitched vows made me flinch. Above a vast grove of entrails was a crimson sunrise, and from the knots of undergrowth foxes sat spying and biding their time.

After a tiny nuptial kiss the birds fly up ... into my spongy gray matter. They've come to extend their thanks for my attendance, but also their regrets since they've forgotten who, exactly, I am. I apparently speak vowel-talk, and I tell them. Plume moths provide a thick confetti for the happy day in the woods. Their wings make a small wind when I open my hands.