Anyway, so for Kate and Steph and maybe Shannon now and then, class starts tomorrow so I hope to be slightly more diligent. If nothing else, at least to keep me on track.
Fritz
I.
The baby in the backseat didn't seem
to mind that I lay painting my right
thigh, my left hip and elbow a Goyan
landscape of purple, black, pointillated
red, with Jenifer Street gravel seconds
after his father opened the driver's seat
door, seconds after that door greeted
my right brake, commencing a crash
course in the etiquette of collisions with
a chain reaction of door to brake, of rider
to air
to road
to feet
to apologies
to emergency room
to pharmacy
to bed
to morning, waking
with wrist swollen,
waking with wonder
at the speed of swell,
the speed of a door
opening, a tire turning,
of purple and red rising
through epithelial layers.
II.
The bruises and scrapes couldn't care less
about the surrounding skin that survived,
but call out achingly to what is left of scars,
eighteen years old, on the plains of my shins;
fading brands, three inch malformed ovals
boiling white the evening I pressed them
against a still-hot muffler, thinking only
of the crescent balanced on the handlebars
of the Harley even after being told careful;
warnings forgotten when the door closed
and my anxiety-electrified seven-year-old
nerves were left alone in an accusatory flood
light of a purely neon moon, left to confess
like a Lutheran to a nature I might not yet
have believed in, that I was afraid.
III.
Today I called you to take inventory, to measure and memorize
each scrape from tip to blood-crusted tip; I asked you for myths
of each constellation, asked you to stay only until after each healed,
until after I could walk you to the door fully clothed because there
was nothing left to see, because I mind your worship of scars more
than your reverence of wounds, because I don’t know when the other
scars smoothed over and left and I imagine how I would have to learn
to not cry when saying he left and not saying but meaning look how he
left no trace, took even the San Juan landscapes we painted so poorly
and then hung while still wet, the red of the mountains dripping down
the unred wall that I only noticed he repainted after he was gone.
IV.
The ER attending
looked pleased as he
stood at the exam room
door, like fractures and
concussions were forefront
in my still-helmeted head,
when really I was still with
Fritz in the back seat. My
mind - let in, caught in, by
the offending door - curved
around his sleep-reddened
cheek, praying for his scars,
a future of limbs holding
the sacred, showing a love
of the fall.
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