Intimacy
I have always told her
almost everything:
the small insight ironing,
traffic at the toll-booth,
red socks, the best
of the stories I told
myself at night.
Now almost everything
belongs to you.
The stories in the night
we write.
How can I stay close
without bringing you
with me,
close to her,
too close
for anyone's ease?
To tell her
how I am touched
is to tell her
how you touch me.
How you touch.
To keep her secrets
from you
betrays nobody
(I tell myself).
To keep your secrets
from her
is to keep
mine, too.
I am trying to leave the Co-op parking lot,
straddling the sidewalk, half into the street,
and every time the cars stop coming
from the left they start from the right.
I sit here trapped and up the street is coming
this blind man, his cane out before him
so he'll see I'm there. The windows rolled up
due to rain, I rev the engine a little to warn him,
but the blind old man keeps coming and the cars
right and left no matter how the lights change,
green-red-green, and the blind man's cane goes
half a foot under my car before it clunks
into the fender. Oh, God--I'm here, dammit,
at the official exit, where it's been for
fifty years, leaving the Co-op just like
the rules say I'm supposed to--sitting here
paralyzed in neutral, revving the engine
to signal my existence to the blind man
(who is either stupid or cheating though
I'm not supposed to say so) who is taking
his cane and beating the shit out of my car.
He gave her two pet ducks for Christmas
and built her a pen for them in the backyard
where she could see them out her kitchen window,
white-feathered and waddling.
That silent night broke into hysterical
quacking. Raccoons from the park left
her ragged feathers. She wept.
She stands to her rib cage deep
in the swelling ocean. Before her
in her hands an unknown baby.He nailed chicken wire over the pen
and brought her home new ducks.
On the fourth sunlit morning,
torn wire, blood spattered
on empty cement. She stopped
him. No, she said. I can't have
any more ducks.Night after night, a baby
slips from her fingers. She cannot
move, waist-deep in the haunted water,
she cannot save it.Ducks in a row, the decades
pass. She drinks.
Attends to no one's
sorrow, feels no pain
she admits. Sealed
somewhere away and safe
from hands too slow
in the ocean, the white
bloody feathers.
--Susan Rawlins