no more snoring
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to sleep in this night of three months
of no sounds but the humidifier breathing moist
air and Pixie scratching at the door to be let into the
room where I dream now having rented out
the one we used to share having given you the bed
we used to share so much we used and were used by
abandonments – your mother’s confidences
and hugs withheld when she’d grown ashamed
– intrusions – your father’s theft of money you’d
earned stocking groceries after school – he took it to
gamble but never said so promised to pay you back but
you knew he never could or would and yet you were a kid so
what could you do? intrusions – my father-psychiatrist
striding into my room as I changed at the age of thirteen
brand-new breasts still shocking my body and – abandonments –
when tears came he said don’t be a baby – now, in this bunk bed I pleasure
myself – if you can call it that – with you not here curled behind my curled body
or curled in front of my curling I cannot cannot whisper to you cannot call you you
have said it harms you to speak to me said I am poison and
you stayed for too long and there is nothing left to understand
except what you have finally understood about my harmfulness and
in your new role as commander of us you order me not to phone not to
speak as though everything I’d ever said were false the universe of my love a
fiction and only you owned the God-awful truth of us – this is why I rock back and
forth like an insane yet savant person in an asylum while you – omniscient doctor –
write your diagnoses of my condition our condition our marriage and your training has
made you wise yes truly wise but even the truly wise fail to see what they cannot – as do all
doctors – I know – I am the daughter of one – and you the saint of the two of
us – and I the sinner of the two of us all that time could not see ahead could glimpse
perhaps an instant no more though you’ve managed to compress our years together into
an opaque bundle – solid and unbearable – a
package that can never be hoisted up or opened – wrapped in
brown paper tied tight with twine and labeled with impenetrable
neatness.