E T I O L A T E

THE DRUM

Paling alongside the aloe,
the stretched membrane
of a drumhead is winter.
It can’t bear to read
anything but an old dictionary–
definitions, musty pages
whisperers of past hands–
it knows what it is like
to long for fingers like
the stark, crooked face of
a stuck clock. For what are we
if we are not keeping time
but dead. From the kitchen
the smell of cream
that’s soured with the week
the drumhead gathers
what permeates the air
in the fibers of its animal organ.
It is a way of holding time
without keeping it. It is
another way of staying alive,
when one is, perhaps, mostly dead.
After all the skin must remember
blood ticking, must sense
the makeup of its past.

THE WOMAN

A woman felts a blue whale
with a sharp, silver needle
in the cold room, on the second
floor. There is no natural light
to work by, today. Her eyes tire,
her fingers slip, she pierces
the vulnerable, underside of
her hands several times.
This is the risk. There is blood
on the blue whale, there is
something left behind.

A TORPOR

The windowless room
reminds you of taking music lessons
in the janitor’s closest.
You’ll stay there, try to remember
the B flat major scale, let the little brains
that occupy your fingers flourish
in the dark. You will stuff your
mouth with paisley tapestries
until you’ve a taste for them.
Try mediating. When it doesn’t
work rub your leather
elbows clean off. This is mercury
in the silver filling. Take soap,
for instance, and all its parentheses.
What it is like to need something calmly;
oil, snow, light.