Book of Dog. Cleopatra Mathis
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But how would that work
when he needed her to be there
in order to make her gone, disappeared
into other. What other? she thought, wondering
how to make herself into someone
absent, so she could be the one
he would welcome, wide-eyed, wanting
to hear whatever it was she had to say.
1. When it began
First a fret in which everything changed.
By morning an underwater language
had overcome me.
When I tried to rise
my body said fall, and so I did.
My weighted hair, my head
turned me over. I could not hear him straight.
I was a doll with a mechanical box, the Mama
crying over and over, a dummy,
a dropped marionette.
Hold me, I said.
So sorry, he said.
2. Not making sense of it
If he was calling, I was too far under—
arm over arm
tangled in the heaving wave,
the body catching
the slap of stones,
swept through a passage.
The brain’s sea in a little box
washed in, a spinning top
come to a stop. Tilted.
•
He was walking some inert shore.
Always the lifeguard, he used to say,
eyes fixed on the water.
3. Nevertheless a common disorder
Some infection in the water, a nastiness
washing through. At first an incidental ache,
then recurring, inflaming
the air-filled cavity of the middle ear—
who knows how it starts,
how it finds the inner ear,
a spiraling labyrinth,
the fluid-filled temporal bone
where two organs live: the embedded
nerves for hearing, or mis-hearing,
and, in a semicircle of canals, the home
for balance. Never
one without the other.
Somewhere in there should have been a marriage.
It was a small comment, wasn’t it, about who they were
—that last year on the dunes when all the town talk
was of coyotes, prairie wolf in search of an ocean,
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