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  • Five poems
  • John Rybicki (bio)

Who Can Say

what sea waits inside us kneeling along some church pew, or reclining on a bench tossing bread crumbs to the pigeons?

Sure the pews were once waves breaking upon that sea, and sometimes the choir master flashes his arms behind the clouds,

or the oaks thrash in the yard conducting the leaves with the ghosts and the flames and their whereabouts no one, not even death, can put out.

What other with her breath will set those pews collapsing against that sea, hurtling all the kneelers with their prayers against God knows what altar?

We are lighter now, my love and I, folding the sky down like a napkin and lacing it inside her hand bag.

She has an appetite for the next step so we drift along the riverbank, sweet with our slit-mouths and rags the dogwoods have stitched together.

Who can say what seed breaks open in our mouths when we kiss? [End Page 158] Or when we stop kissing, the fire draining from our loins

to spell such things in the grass. Beyond the forest and three rivers ten thousand thousand lifeboats we set to drift brimming almost birdbath with water.

Sure the refractory sun shimmers in those pools as we sit on a hillside amid the swaying grass with our foreheads touching.

Just like always the sunlight reaches with its fingers to take hold of us, as if the wide earth were the cradle it was rocking us in. [End Page 159]

April 8, 2008

Earth, receive an honoured guest.

—W. H. Auden

I

The nurses kept saying, Tell her it’s okay to go. A nectar of love bruised their bewildered faces and I wanted to trick it into Julie’s IV sack. She had a burn mark big as a giant’s hand along her neck. I cupped my own hand around her bald head and she breached back almost to consciousness, moaned from so deep in her earth, a Julie sound and I devoured it. Sometimes I’d say what the nurses asked me to say, other times I’d whisper: Don’t leave me here.

I wanted her body to be an earth that went on and on forever.

II

Winter held its tentacles to our eyes as we watered my wife with dew those final fifty-two days. A halo of the living surrounded her bed as my son’s tears anointed her forehead.

Now the weather was letting go of the stones of cheekbones, the pretty perfumed faces. Beyond the hospital, as we neared her petrifaction, people sat sipping blood on bar patios and everywhere along that anthill citizens sliced the fleshy canvas. [End Page 160]

III

The godhead roaring in my chest says there’s no such thing as death. I need only plant one crumb of my love behind her ribs and her ruby heart will bloom forever.

I remember us both on a Friday night deciding to use our hands as erasers to erase the hospital and go on a date. It was the end of a week in quarantine, more than a month in, and we prepared Julie for her first outing. The nurses fawned over her for forty-five minutes, new diapers and clean linen in her lap, my lass thanking them every time they brushed one feather across the air for her.

She beamed through her bruised skin the kind of stoicism a mountain might have if a mountain could swaddle itself in flesh and house a fat pear of light stolen from the sun.

She stood for that first dance, one arm about my waist, one wrist dangling over my shoulder as I backpedaled for those first baby steps toward the door. Her legs had atrophied to noodles.

In the hallway she spread her arms as we shoved off in the wheelchair, her smile crinkling the mask over her nose and mouth. “I’m in a ragtop convertible with the top down and the wind is in my hair.”

Round and round the hospital hallway park on our promenade, tipping our hats congenially to the other passengers in the gallows, with their rosy partners...

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