Birkensnake 7

I thought about how you liked scarves at 6 PM the day your mother was dead. It was visual.

There were flowers on your blue pants. You couldn’t believe it. Some messages arrived.

Your girlfriend was at the airport. It was a situation of importance. I didn’t know what to tell you.

I told you I loved you. I told you you had arrived where you had already been for so long. I told you Chrissie was a bitch. This was at the place with the black IPA’s. We sat there in disbelief. Your sister was Kelly. She was an important figure in the story. This was the mother you had all along. The one with the apartment in Mississippi. You really cried. The cigarettes moved around inside you. A band came. They were the background music. I was hot. I needed an ice cone. It wasn’t day anymore. You talked to a relative. You told me about your mother’s jobs. She was a church member. That’s who found her. Another church member. It was the end of winter in March.

*

You put the scarf on your face when you cried. Miniature flowers got on your face. On the phone you said you’re lying. You repeated it many times. The eras were in the room with us. They were breaking like pills. I couldn’t use sentences. I went to the train station. I bought you a burrito and a Diet Coke. You weren’t hungry. You had taken yourself out for a grilled cheese. It was at the café next door. The one where Jack Kerouac used to write. It was an old place. Everyone was on methadone back then. Thin families. Families of thousandaires.

*

Stay here with us, I wanted to tell the bartender. This is what’s happened. It’s clear sorrow. There’s room for you. It’s not particles. Get us in your arms. Keep us there. Feed us baby trees. The overhead lights were a galaxy we couldn’t get into. I can’t believe the musicians. The soot. The night’s love. How someone went to Cambridge in the next conversation I had when you had already driven away and had slept fine with no dreams. No heiresses in my breakfast. An alliance of grain. A show about water.

*

This is my restless side. My tiger anger. An airhole for my RV. I have something wild in me. It is a baby. It has a whole body and a soft head. I can feel the baby move after your mother is dead. I touch it at the bar. From the outside you can see it’s there. It’s like heaven. My experiences of heaven involve photographs of hollows. Pastries shaped like horses.

*

I can’t say what I’m into. We don’t talk about literature the whole time after your mother is dead. We move through the air undressed. I think of every time you had a mother. How you looked back then. Of the movie you watched and when you went to Cambodia where your friend was looking for an abortion and you loved someone on a motorcycle then we were in Ireland, in a town off the coast, Strandhill, walking next to the ocean and you had just seen how someone you always loved was married. There was a lot of distance. Now you can’t tell him what happened. It doesn’t work that way. He’s a father with a house. The cinema has arrived. The women are silver keys. The white tablecloths are here. They are passionate. At least my hair looks pretty, you said. The one aunt you do like. She goes into your mind. She doesn’t have terrible children. I breathed like a track suit across from you. Breathing for us both. In song.

*

The Saturday breakfast crowds. I dreamed everyone was wearing Robyn’s clothes. I’m going to have a baby. I just know it. I’m 38 weeks pregnant. I think about the people at the park who could cut me open. I have to throw these flowers away. At the roadside. A real disaster. It’s going to happen to everyone I just thought of you first. You wake up and say you’re going to build the vacuum. This is before you’re a father. It’s Friday. You want coffee. You tell me fans keep going on the court.

*

You’re going to have a baby soon, I say. I know, you say. I think of the baby every time. She is made of numbers. I organize her clothes. They are small and from other people. Her room has me in it with her inside me. I’ve never had anyone live in me. My body is not carnivorous so I could have. I think of everyone who has ever lived inside another person. We have our own marrow. I sit next to the phone call thinking about how police can save babies. It’s a time when the world exists. And asteroids. I want your hair to be like music from the bedroom.

*

I haven’t gotten cramps. I practice getting them for one day. At the hospital tour I sit in a chair to remind myself of my body. I cry there. We know where to park now. At home, you say you feel better you know what it’s like. We take a lot of classes. We title our baby many things over time. Some of the titles are wrong and we know it. I’m not a fancy dresser. I wear my one thing. I think how soon I will wear more than this. I think of everyone’s togetherness. I walk around open holding one piece of my field.

*

A man held me to a roller coaster once at a work party in Missouri. He looked like a creek. Back then I would drive out to the farm and take drugs. One girl was a ho. Eileen was her name. She was the sister of a boy whose friend lost all of the hair on his body. It was Greg. He was everyone’s friend and loved God. Some of the boys almost died once. They were driving through Buckner. The helicopter came to get them. They were healed. They were made of small parts that could be fixed. They were made of the earth. I would be with them for hours. I would drive my car to the stream and sit next to it counting out my ideas of water.

*

I count how many times I can remember one thing. It’s one hundred. I don’t like thinking about marriages. You’re reading the news about Ukraine. It’s crazy over there, you say. You tell me about an asteroid and Malaysia. I have enough information for the day. I till it in my mind. I am a place for thoughts and orange juice. I eat at the breakfast diner before we get there. I walk in covered in my kind of food. I wonder who here has partials and long furs to put in front of their doors in winter. Another time we don’t even go to breakfast. I eat dinner for breakfast. I eat collard greens and rice.

*

Now you’re singing “Wheel in the Sky” by Journey and dancing with the dog in your track shorts. We think about getting a hotel. You show me attachments from the vacuum. You show me all the parts it comes with. It has screws. We are both animals inside. We have great faith in this vacuum. You assemble it for a short amount of time in the living room. It’s intended for homes with pets. It offers reciprocity.

*

Your mother is dead. It’s been two days. I can’t stop thinking about all of life. How at the hospital they can see everything. I cut my hair without looking and wash the scissors when I’m through. I take a shower. After the shower I only wear a shirt. Thank god it’s a long shirt. I am the star witness of a crime scene.

*

It’s Friday. Now you’re building the co-sleeper. I smell my hands. I think of what they’ll hold soon. The co-sleeper doesn’t require tools. Sometimes life comes and goes. I recognize certain features of the earth as places in our lives. We are made of small things. They pass in and out of us. We compare everything to dust. Some of the places are to have inside of us. It’s raining now. That’s part of life.

*

I remember one time your mother was almost dead. You were crying at a bar. We didn’t get to the bar on horses. You thought about every time she was almost dead. About how you had a feeling. When she died you didn’t expect it. You were cleaning the house and listening to Dan Savage. I came over. Call your sister, I said. I was just cleaning the house, you told her, what’s going on? You’re lying. You’re lying. You repeated it like you were a diplomat. Like it was your favorite thing to say. You sat down. You got back up. You smoked a cigarette and made a phone call. It was a regular day with a regular temperature. It was a Wednesday. It was Ash Wednesday.

*

I trained for a marathon once. I ran over seven miles one day. It was in Georgia. At 4 AM I ran around the track not having any thoughts. On the way home I found a violin in the woods. It was on fire.

*

The co-sleeper doesn’t have another level. It’s for the ground. We have to get a different one. We learn many important things about the furniture infants need. We lie in place like we’re in a tent. The furniture makes you think of our culture. The paranoia that exists around suffocation. Our co-sleeper is really a play yard. That’s why it doesn’t work. We use it anyway. We think it is a dreamy bassinet and fill it with our love.

*

It’s Friday. I have to grade papers. I have to tell the students about contribution. About how what they write should contribute to what they’re writing. About themes. Instead of grading, I imagine us camping on a small island in a forest of hospitals. We are the only ones there. I have a student with MS whose boyfriend used to be suicidal. She gave me soap on the last day of class.

*

You stand in the rain. Your penis is in the rain. I have grape juice for breakfast. I think of two money things. It’s raining because it’s the end of winter. My categories of thought diminish. The people from a long time ago are far away. Some of them have already died. Death is a statue of the Gold Rush. It’s like many purchases at the mall all at once at night after the mall’s closed.

*

I am never tan. I think about this when I see people who are. One guy I know lives on an island. He is famous. I think of him as tan. Some people die tanning. Aunt Bev would do it. She would drive to the salon in her Cadillac. She had a poodle and a husband named Clarence. She called the police on me. It was when I walked up the school hill with some friends at dawn. We were very young and hadn’t slept. We sat on the asphalt and watched as ghosts disappeared over our neighborhood. This is when we went into the woods every day and when everything dangerous was happening all the time: the white van parked by Marissa’s, the clown who lived in the woods behind the school, the darkness in our bedrooms where we kissed a lot of boys who had drunk mothers.

*

I am a stable of horses in winter. They are inside of me as the weather changes. They are as terrorized as salt. I am one empire from you in here. I give you a movie theater. Your friend Catherine calls. I hear the air you use to speak with. You find out how everyone is. We pretend our house is an office with beds. We watch a movie with Liam Neeson. I think of how mermaids are big jokes this time of year. I think you are a stereo.

*

The weather is from a different time inside of me. It changes to snow. I have a cloth couch to clean. Our trashy enormous love runs wild through me like scared birds and, as if I was named Claire, I count them all day instead of buying air filters for the house.

*

I am cut off from time. Your mother died many years ago. On a mountain. Before there were countries and it was an economy of grass.

*

I put the flowers outside in the snow and watch them through the window. I see from inside of myself the real problem. The lusty beach inside each petal. I am wide open inside. I’ve sat on many trampolines. Once while I was on one there was a guy inside named Jim who liked crack. He was spiritual. He met my aunt at a psychic fair and they drank champagne in the car. I lived on one side of a living room then and sometimes a guy who talked about psychic vampires would come over and put garlic on the things in the house and on the people who were there. He was spiritual as well. One time I saw him place a crucifix on my sleeping aunt.

*

When I lived on one side of the living room, I didn’t take up much space. I had a blanket, a pillow, a dresser, and a tapestry for a wall. Sometimes men would bring me flowers. There was a lot of opium then and a girl named Nichole who gave us cocaine. One night she gave us so much cocaine that I almost choked to death at a bar. It was my birthday. The other time I almost choked to death was at a bank in Albuquerque. It had nothing to do with cocaine. The people in line concentrated on me. It was like I was an application for a job they really wanted but couldn’t fill out because they knew deep down they weren’t qualified for it.

*

One time in my life I had a rich friend named Melanie. When I was out of town she lived in my house and told people she was me. One person she told this to was Gordy. It didn’t work because he knew me. He went out with Shaness, the girl whose parents kept track of how many ice cubes were being used by Shaness and her brother. They were real dickwads. One night Gordy took a shit in the street. Everyone was drunk then. They were classical and Midwestern, showing each other their bodies, inducting each other into their own halls of fame.

*

I’m pregnant. That’s why wet stuff keeps coming out of me. I change into more comfortable pants. I’m not entered into any raffles. You are in a way. You are trying to win 270 million dollars. It happened the other day at the train station. You paid two dollars for a ticket after we waited in a long line.

*

I won $75 once at a casino. It was nighttime. I bought champagne. Everyone I wanted to tell was out to lunch. It was that kind of casino. Not the kind like in Albuquerque where they mail you $5 coupons and you can cash them in for real money. Money is something we have to pay attention to now. It matters if we have it.

*

A friend sent me his new record today. It sounds like a cave in space. Last night you took me to the Italian restaurant for dinner and then we bought a fan. We put the fan in the room where we can most hear our neighbor. He builds banks. Sometimes he’s gone all night. I think he builds tunnels under the banks he builds. He’s a construction worker with a son. Because we live in the same house separated by a thin wall, we can hear each other’s voices. He’s not crazy. He spends his days off in the garage working on his road bikes. He’s not someone either one of us is interested in sexually. On the day we moved in, his son said to me, Just so you know, I can hear everything you say. I didn’t feel threatened.

*

Your mother died a long time ago. It was after many years of silence. It was winter was turning to spring and the white-beaked black ducks had come in. You were uncertain of what it meant to be an orphan. You were beautiful not knowing. Your face was an explanation of wonder. You took all the wildernesses from inside you and pinned them to your body. Your condition was extravagant. You were in the most beautiful uncertainty anyone had ever seen. You were a wind song in the desert on TV on mute. No one knew what you were. You were a thing in the world not connected to history. You were a wagon wheel.

*

At the infant care class they show us photographs of what babies look like moments after they’re born. The images make me faint. I walk out of the room and lie on the hospital floor in front of the elevator. Doctors stand over me. Their faces are far away. I tell them I’m fine. That I just need to lie down here. They want to get me up. I tell them I prefer to stay where I am. The linoleum feels good on me. It feels like people massaging each other. The doctors leave. I have my own hallway then. You have to be perfect, I tell it, you have to keep me here in your perfection forever. We’re together in this, I tell it, it’s just us.

*

I am enormous all day. I walk gigantically from room to room. I’m not trying to lose weight. I am an object in space. I am a Sumerian. I have a Sumerian’s way about me. My neck. My other parts. I am in a hall of hung animals, thinking of your heart. The other galaxies. The other places in time we haven’t been yet but know are inside of us waiting for us to get there so we can be whole and so that we can possess enough of this world that we can go, finally, back to sleep.