Hyperemesis Gravidarum
Charlotte Brontë, you died in 1855,
two years after the publication
of your fourth and best novel, Villette,
before the twentieth-century invention
of sonar and penicillin and world wars,
so you never had an ultrasound,
never blushingly lifted your somber skirts
to let a hard plastic probe
smeared in warm custard jelly
wobble against the white tremulous skin
of your short and stocky abdomen,
which for forty years shrank
from all touch except your own,
never saw the contours
of the larval life form waxing in your womb,
a pitiable spineless lone crescent sardine
of a half-written girl,
adhering as if by suction-cup feet
to its water-balloon home’s inner concavity,
never saw what it was, this waif
sheltering beneath the feral toadstool
of your fast-beating heart,
which you cupped and held for as long you could
before vomiting yourself to death,
loving it blindly.
* * * * *
While I Was Out
My husband reports
this morning a finch flew into our gorgeous
church-sized foyer window
and died on impact with the spotless glass,
now no longer spotless
but stained by a streak
of gore, brown.
I asked, at least it didn’t suffer, right.
When he replied yes it did,
immediately regretted asking.
Better not to know, to read doomy newspapers
sparingly or never, perhaps.
He felt a push to twist-snap the bird’s neck
to guillotine-end its agony. How awful to do that,
maybe not as bad as it would feel
to kill a human being, but still terrible.
And birds leave no living will.
The tyrannosaurs left no wills, either,
annihilated when sphere collided with sphere,
two edgeless masses
causing all this trouble.