In Another

The cancer seeded her; and harvested her; and dined off the best
and tenderest parts; and he meanwhile grieved and he meanwhile
clung for meaning to his work, he was a specialist
in “tissue preservation studies”—mummies—and was lost
in the perceptible down on a child’s upper lip that had survived
2,000 years of fen and airlessness, he photographed this,
he chemoanalyzed this, it often floated him as functionally as a safety raft
across the abyss—as elsewhere, meanwhile, someone is remembering
and hammering into forgetfulness and remembering a childhood
so mired in the spew of certain adult uses made of her, that
now her reigning passion is the sculpturing of soap shard
into sleek chaste abstract figurines the catalogues
for shows of hers call “spirit swarm,” and these she shapes
and reshapes to an evolving fantasia as intricate as Tolkien’s
—as somewhere someone is entering a night of unwise sex,
is arrowing into it like a pearl diver, in the attempt to undo
an earlier night of unwise sex, itself the late replacement
of an even earlier similar night, and so forth in a personal-historical
pattern of nesting-doll recession, every new encounter vivified
the way a leaf is after rain, beaded and somehow deeper
—as somewhere every one of us is heading into the fuel for the day,
the necessary erasure, the place of being subsumed and empowered,
the sweat lodge, or the rinse job, or the high fly over to center field,
whatever it happens to be for a given participant, a given
set of lips at the nipple of something larger than it is,
an entrance, a new self, an escape, the barbituate fog,
the tracking of nuclear weapons sales, the mountain dulcimer
and its pristine tunes, the 4-H hog with a First Prize ribbon
that takes the sun on its gleamed-up face as fully as a module
as it’s shunted in place for the space station being constructed
in what’s almost a ballet at zero gravity, and Delia and Earl
and the Jesus van they rattle in from city to city
spreading the Word, with a palliative of a hallelujah
coating their tongues and sometimes running like foxfire over their tongues,
and with the power of the Son of God and His crucified splendor
steering for them, decoding the road map’s obdurate arterial possibilities
for them, assuring them every mile, every meal, that Glory’s awaiting
around the corner: how would they ever get through this life
if they didn’t live in another?