From One Body
I.
We were absorbing the slow current
spun by the ceiling fan, and on our skin
the moon overcast evergreen branches,
the shadows drifting thick across the stretch
of our skin that seemed to be turning, turning,
but we lay still
wrapped in eight limbs, a thing
about to be; I held you, a mirror
against my chest, dying
to look but wanting to go
unseen. By early morning I have become
cold and spread the sheets, climbing slowly
over your unmoving form. I turn
to look at you in the thirteen seconds
before the fan stops spinning, my hand
on the switch as I stand naked and watch
the air settle over your face.
II.
Hours have passed
and I am watching the History
Channel, wrapped in blankets and waiting
for the results of a mummy dissection.
When the cellular evidence is magnified
on the screen behind him, the scientist says
in one woman they've found
proof that the diseases she carried,
and the lotus flowers
she ate for the pain
still float in the rivers of Egypt today,
just as they dried in her veins
and are extracted in a single strand.
The scientists smile as they explain,
reanimating the disease
of a woman ten thousand years
dead.
III.
And the day takes shape around me;
when mud from a long run
hardens on my shoes and crumbles loose
over the kitchen floor,
when running water
pulls sweat from my chin and drips
into my stopped-up sink; it wrinkles
with breath when my reflection surfaces
and drains away; at some point you are not
rippling from its center anymore.
IV.
In the darkness the scientists recite the story
from inside my pillow, in the time
it takes for the ceiling fan to stop turning.
She is walking in my living room
with cracking joints, with chemical traces of lotus
floating useless in her tributaries.
And in one body there is proof again
that disease and cure can coexist
after the heart quits, after the stirring stream
of visits shuts dry as the click
of a plywood door; and I am
one ripple in my bedclothes, smiling
in the hum of the half-dreamed ending,
the scientists mumbling
that diseases flower in rivers after death.
Appeared in Potomac Review in 2005.