Gum

The gum she bought by the flat. Blue or green,mixed in her mouth with the brown chaw we foundin its pouch in the drawer, it congealed—kneaded and jowled, wrung out as a fear,a grief, a grudge—into amorphous gray.

Like a rock, until you touched it.Asking her about it was futile. It was her gum.How come she saved it? To chew again.How come it was gray? … I know our questionsfelt like accusations, though we hardly knew

what chewing tobacco was. Eventually,older kids in the neighborhood were consulted.But since the unholy combination was otherwiseunheard of, it was a working theory,theoretically suspended like the tobacco juice

we couldn't but figure she swallowed.Combining, saving, savoring—what could be worthsuch gruesome thrift? You found yourselfstaring at it, thinking of it as an asteroidescaped from one of Dad's always incompatible

books across the hall. Or when I was sure, again,something had happened to her, and lay on her sideof the bed looking at it in its ashen, abandoneddisfigurement, as if there—unlike in the wordson the page where I was afraid of getting lost,

of screaming and screaming and no onecould hear—; as if there I could read,by the light of love's forensics, allthat she swallowed, all that went unsaid,the marks of a seal, a worked-over, hallowed terrain.