When It Rains I Can Smell the Dead

Children are flying black kites in the street

their jackets coming unbuttoned with excitement,

and I begin to think about the tidal water in my hometown,

how my Sunday school teacher’s wife jumped

off the Cooper River bridge, and I am almost crying

when I think about her hands, how hard

they must have gripped the steel rail,

how sickeningly pretty she must have been

her brown hair fluttering behind her,

the grey ocean, grey sky, a white seagull, a ship.

When it rains I can smell the dead

birds being washed from the sidewalk

like some genesis, a calling to confess

the tightening of a fist, less than hopeful shrugs,

silence as I drove away from the old house.

It is this way now, roaring outside, electric

and damp, the chatter of broken wings blowing

down the street. My life has changed too much.

It is all carnal, my brain like a bin of week old fruits,

torched, side-of-the-road, and failing to sell.

I get out of bed this time of year like a stone ghost.

I am never at rest, ballooned, chewing raw rice

to assuage myself. In my dreams I heave into a clean well

and you don’t want to watch. To spread my legs is to weep

with you, so I will be water in caves beneath you

singing the beginning of a list, my mouth a cell, deep

and dark, in it the shoulder bone of my second baby.

I wonder how much longer you plan to stay

with me, how much longer until your lungs

have had enough of these dark hymns.

I am not who you thought, a valley,

yellow souled, a sad little woman leaping

for food, too short to reach the water, watching

the bar move higher up the wall, starving.

Afterwards I can’t stop crying, and all I want from you

is to say it is going to be okay, but you don’t

or you can’t, one, and I curl up to your turned body

in the dark, trying to find your heartbeat

as if it will allay this dead body in a dead house,

as if this wide embrace might save us.