My first elegy...

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Callear's Legs

How do I say
that I would do anything
one sarcomere short of everything
to transplant my lateral motor neurons

to your spinal cord.
That I would crawl through
the fence and cocoon myself
around the transformer, combusting

into a thousand trillion nerve cells if
the sparks could massage
the sclerosis out of your atrophied tissue.
That I would roll myself into sheaths, bulk

myself into muscle, scissor the skin and
unscrew my femoral heads
from their hip sockets to see you not even run,
not even bike

not even take the stairs
to your third-floor workspace, but
walk
from the passenger seat of your wife's Ford

to the building's door without
the walker
and without
the clenched grimace of the determination

needed to drag two limbs that are
uninterested - no, abhorrent of
being called your own. You.
You who taught me of the heart like no man

I have ever met: EKGs and angiograms;
treadmill, dobutamine, and nuclear
stress tests; ejection fractions, x-rays, angioplasties,
stents, Holters, AICDs; valves, arteries, atriums and

ventricles.
Never before had the ugly mass
inside my chest been so much more beautiful
than vintage handmade Valentines, salutations

concluding sincere love letters, dots of the "i"s of
third-grade girls' handwritten
history essays, gold and ruby lockets hanging
from slim throats housing thumbnail photographs

of boys
who think jewelry is an easier way to get
inside a girl than whispering
something cardiac.

Never before had I understood that my circular
nature was more
than psychological; that when I
could not speak,

I could still pump my heart
to pump my legs
to pump the pedals,

and it would be enough.
.
.
.

Tonight your ghost will ask my ghost...

...where is the love?

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I Was a Young Wife, I Was a Young Mother

There are sixteen of them: inside
the seventh and wrapped around

the eighth, I keep the post-its he
wrote his vows on, even though

at the altar his nineteen year old
nerves took over and his declaration

of love started and ended with shit
girl, you know I won't let you down.

Where Teddy Ruxpin's tape deck
once kept his stories of discovering

Grundo with Grubby, I keep home
video cassettes: reels of the dance

indigenous only to her eight-month
old bones that she kicked and shook

as her first teeth jack-hammered
their way into her head; reels we'd

labeled To Be Watched with Baby's
First Date. In the hollowed handle

bars of his Y-Foil still chained
to the fence in the backyard, I keep

a collage, ransom-note-arranged
headlines of Young Wife Becomes

Young Widow; Twenty-Year-Old
Woman Buries Infant Daughter.

Poorly pixelated black and white
photographs of police and caution

tape and tarped mounds amid
a wasteland of steel and glass

along the 500 block of East
Jefferson Avenue: Small

Town Serenity Rocked By
Raid on Drug Ring: Father

and Daughter's Walk Ended
by Speeding Getaway Car.

In bottles lining shelves lining
the attic walls: things I don't

want to forget: the smell of my
husband's skin after ten hours

sweating with tar and gravel;
the taste of our baby's sleepless

nights and the terror of her first
silent one; the sound of her laugh

with the sound of his mouth
blowing raspberries on the rolls

of her fat little legs; the feel of his
wedding band through the sheets.

In the black ink above my left
breast: two cat claw scratches,

one inscribed 1/19/82-5/28/04,
the other 9/2/03-5/28/04.

In going back to the wild patch
of blackberries across from our

home, taking them seventy-nine
miles away to my home to bake

a pie that I will eat in one sitting,
sitting on the floor so that I am

not so far from the ground
that holds the bodies of the ones

I need.
And now you think

you know me. But you only
know where I keep my love.
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Take Heed of the Man Missing His Incisor

Come close. Close enough that you can't
tell the whites around my neck aren't pearls.

Close enough that I can massage your gums
with my warm milk and bourbon-dipped
thumb and forefinger; that you eagerly open
your mouth for my brown sugar-dipped lips
and let me suck the roots from the sockets.

Now go. I am not the kind to put boys in
boxes and ship them to the bottom of active
volcanoes: I would rather hear how you
whistle your th's, smile a scared and sacred
homage when you tell them, her, that one...