Cheryl Snell
Grief
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It shrapnels you where you stand, a hard
arrow centering the skull. It multiplies with movement, a series of same a coronation, a halo, a pain writhing the dark and the heat–and at daybreak, while the damaged hide, it explodes in endless incarnation. (artwork by Janet Snell) A Small Perturbation in the StandsShock rocked the stadium
the day the pitcher struck out the seagull. Someone flipped a fair coin into thin air. Its glint bribed the sky with false promises. When the bird dropped from a flock overhead wings fanned the coin ambiguously. Heads or tails? No one could have predicted such perfect syzygy of bird ball and bat! The pitcher’s true arm waylaid tried instincts with a powerhouse thwack . A flutter of feathers sprayed the uppermost sky as if a pillow had been shot. Mathematicians & gambling men know: the rarer the ....event the larger the deviation. From the norm? From what’s true? The long hard jock begs the question from the back of his stretch limousine. Sometimes the sky holds up an unlikely blue moon. Sometimes coincidence slides into home plate of the miraculous. Flicker Vertigo
A parable unreels in air made luminous
with silver nitrate and dust. Glint struck off a propeller tells a story begun far from here. Contrails corkscrew toward animals cringing in their furs like dowagers in a bad neighborhood. Two old pilots play chess in the park, hearing aids off, cataract eyes unable to track disturbances in the air of newsreel memories. In their wars, charged images flicked past too fast to register. Information received at 15 spins/second condenses thought to pudding, ricochets off the exits and perpetual threat of fire. Under a corrugated sky, wounds still bloom; where there is a pounding in the temple, fistfuls of summer poppies push through the scarred gray crust of winter. Message from Home
All that August the house seesawed
between heat and wet. Bedraggled relations in souvenir shirts wondered if they’d brought enough clean underwear. We exchanged gifts earmarked for the junk drawer. The front door swelled shut and I cased the window like a thief. They split into cliques, filling blackout hours with clannish grievance. I wondered why until my head ached. When mornings cooled and we recognized the coffee steam for what it was, we divided snapshots, reminiscing already, energized by the idea of parting. In the wake of kissed air and reconfigured goodbye, I stood at the door waving, long past the hour that would have them turning back, frantic with apology; and rushing into the house, convinced they had left something precious there, something they would recognize if they ever saw it again. Recovery Room
She shivers awake
to find him holding her glass fingers. "I’m still here," she whispers. Her surprise cracks over words too small for him to pick up. "Where else would I be?" he misunderstands as if he hadn’t run for miles with her pulse in his ears. As if she hadn’t already said goodbye. Know
The tech’s wand slides
down a jezebel breast. A spiked fist shivers the screen its cells vying for immortality. As if danger can only be known by its face not shape not shadow. The room goes cold with underwater voices: "We won’t know" until the biopsy the labs come back we get in there. Don’t flinch-- much worse will come-- the mass unzipped and appraised the scar’s mad map burning skin inward. And later when you unbutton your blouse for yet another white-coated crowd you’ll surrender like the nude at Manet’s picnic no longer listening to talk of cure and recurrence risk and benefit prediction and the probability that all this is necessary because we just never know.
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Another Name for FireMourners fill the church where a boy's broken
mother lights a candle. Its glow ignites, halting as first steps, radiant as a halo. The flame stammers above the mother's hands as she cups heat that will never warm her again. When sparks fly, they throw shadows against the walls. They gutter, and the shapes slump to the floor. The mother tries to call back the light, to pinch it into being. It's exactly the wrong thing to do, and the church goes dark, erasing the ghosts of young men who once sprawled in the pews, their startled faces lit in the flicker that just moments before they hoped they'd never have to see again. Voyager
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She enters a room
as if it’s an undiscovered island. "Where is my other house? I want to go home." For her losses, I grieve. I cannot bear to watch her wander, lost in her small places. I remember how she loved the panoramic-- the prairie she was born to, the cathedral ceilings in the living room, Mosquito Lake cradling our sailboat. Space made her feel safe. Now when she reaches for it, she tells me she doesn’t know how to leave; even as she steps her feet into my brother’s big shoes and slides them forward as a child might each one a boat she’d like to glide away in. ThresholdLeaning on cut-out sky, the warped window
twists like an arthritic hip. Better off untouched, we decide, and leave it embedded in decades of dirt. That house had good bones; made it hard to move. We imagined French doors thrown open on guests lined up to the horizon, shimmering in fancy dress at the seam of earth and sky. Such dreaming exhausted us. To steady our nerves, we plucked at the piano’s guts, summoned singsongs already gone sharp or flat. Silence curdled the light slapped against sun-bleached walls. We’d never have chosen that color if we’d known how it would fade, or that we’d have to live with it so long. Insomnia
I stand guard over your fitful sleep. Heat rises, mixes
with your sweat while I watch your fever rage. It’s almost midnight. Planets blink, offer neither clue nor compassion. The hour’s breaking shivers with sound, draws me to the window below the shingled wings of the sloping roof. A bird tunes its throat, swells a single pitch from the quavering source. Shapes from a far branch answer, the motif embellished as if caught in a lie. Notes loosed into an imitation of flight remind me of all that must not happen in the dark: a soul slipping away, all vigilance forsaken. I turn back to you, pulse quick with dotted rhythms and count out the time left to us under your vein-mapped skin. Late Effects
Light-fingered at first
by the time they are everywhere they have dug in to loot the body and douse what’s left with flames. At night I wake to ransack sounds breaking bones curdling blood. I beg them to stop … I can’t lose any more but my voice is already among the lost things. Anesthesia
The dream a dive
to the bow of a sinking ship. Fearless deft diver scalpel in his teeth gleaming under white sails. Fearless deft scalpel freeing the prow’s carved woman from a ship already sunk. The Chase
A man rounds the corner, zigzag
shadow reaching for the woman who steps out of it. He’s a late-comer, can’t catch up to the lady strolling through dusk that blazed gold only this morning. He’d pulled the quilt over his head, begged the clock for ten more minutes but she’d already pitched forward into events no one can plan for. Along straggling streets that will never connect them, the woman moves on. Behind her, the man elbows through the crush, searching all the places where a door is left ajar. A wedge of light spills onto steps falling from the house into the hooded evening. He’d have followed her the way she wanted, but night curves without warning, the stars do not touch, the road stretches down to the sea. Faith
The nurse came in, thinking
I was asleep, and started to pray. I wanted to throttle her words, rob them of their power, but it was late and I was weak from opening and closing on a steel slab all day. When I heard that blessing again-- its cadence a flatline static, its breath the false thunder of rattled tin-- someone was reading it aloud like a poem. Faith sometimes comes across that way-- sliding in beside you with a blue mask on wild with sound and sense, and you have to let it have its say. |
