Turning In
Jean, I write you, this version of your name, within myself,
unsure, other than wanting —
My mother, love measured only by itself
and the empty glass beside it,
the grumbling breath of the dog,
asleep where Heather would be were
we speaking and listening. Recording and turning away
from the mind’s grids and loops,
what you attend to, Jean, when you turn away —
In your last year, you dropped the final en and ee,
which you pronounced throughout your life nee,
from Jeanne to Jean,
as if slipping off a shoe,
and then the other
before turning in to bed.
*
Before I sleep, I want to write you, your difference,
averting the eyes, as in apostrophe —
In life, I loved your presence,
so often wordless with me.
Was it your wordlessness
or mine. Or ours.
*
I was abroad.
Delirious. Afraid. I brought a club of wood with me
to my bed, a plywood board with a wool blanket.
The sound of bells from the window,
handbells, I imagined, quadrilateral in shape,
their cluck cluck cluck cluck
passing through me
as a kind of instrument,
as if a germ
leaving the body.
*
Dark holes in the concrete floor and baths and sink basins,
in the fever dream, it was hard to tell.
Spilling onto a cotton sheet,
kidney shaped, speckled lozenges, as large as beans.
I remember a kind of medicine egg,
a sweet custard albumen, set like a yoghurt, the center a tasteless differentiated mass.
And a woman who wanted to give the doctor more money.
Last night, Jean, I was there again.
The uncontainable life-world,
Lytle Shaw writes, which alone points downward and has palpitation,
a glistening quality to the lower right corner.
And a spray hose attached to a sphere
hung from a hook, to clean myself.
When I returned, you had purchased for me, remember,
a small dog
shaped like a fox, to protect me.
*
Paul tells me, he held you as you died,
of the gore of the medics’ efforts.
He wished he hadn’t called.
*
On the shore of the world, my new little family’s first time in a tent, nothing with us
but a bag of clothes.
The rain storm in the morning, the kite
I left on the beach while Heather and I and the kids walked,
gone when we came back,
blown into the waves, we assumed, although we couldn’t see it,
its plastic and string.
The mammals, Jean, in the waves before us as we searched.
You were not there and you were,
in repeatable form.
*
I have planed the legs of your writing desk, I wrote Heather, this morning,
so it fits
between the baseboards that flank it now.
The quite continuous vibration of animal spirits.
The ribbons of wood off the jack plane.
I’d spent hours online learning how and finally got lucky.
*
No longer a person, you remain my mother.
The world comes slowly
to you and to me,
plangent, as if the sound of a bell, or a little wolf, howling to herself.
Winter after rain, the click of the clock, echoic —
so that the familiar becomes a trap, too easy, private, outside of public discourse.
One leg I mismeasured and shaved to 11/16 of an inch rather than 13/16.
Aiming for uniformity, I shaved the other three down.
Somehow all of this has become tied to money now.
Darwin wrote almost with the quickness and certainty of a dog.
As time is money, then may it turn up again in bed and sleep.
May it turn again to art.
*
Paul writes you were a voracious reader.
Now we are the times,
imitating winter after rain.
He wants you to be known — to translate your being,
to translate you, the rain still in the air,
the scent of cedar permeating it, from where I sit.
*
Without difference, no movement.
Your difference through the fibers of the middle brain,
as communicated to me.
When I lived alone, all my thoughts were interesting.
Now other people’s thoughts interest me. My mind is empty.
And how to write to you who would never read this,
to limit the language so that I might reach you on earth and also in this pretend.
Perhaps better to speak about you to another —
I hear the sleepy music
which envelops the bed as Heather puts the kids to sleep,
passing through me, as an instrument —
And it occurs to me
that I could tell it here by asking questions.
When we love harmlessly, and with more care.
/ / /
Note: “Turning In” adapts language from Lytle Shaw’s New Grounds for the Dutch Landscape, Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, Swiss physician Johannes Hofer’s definition of nostalgia, and John Donne’s “The Cross,” taken from my reading before turning in to bed during the months I composed these lines.