Yesterday

Yesterday,

while it snowed and snow-blow blowed,

I sat holding an old book of the best

of Goya’s most known pieces, and so

yes, the nude who reclined in the pale light

and too the same nude but not nude

though each of what you expected: two

breasts pushing up through, beautiful

the thin cloth recalling the inner linen

I’d glimpse when the priest put his

consecrated hosts within the lit tabernacle.

I watched his hands disappear completely,

full as they were with salvation on hold

and didn’t they absolutely glow when

he pulled them away empty and locked

the door and gave me the key for safe

keeping.  I’d wait for my brother to make his way

back with the cruets and the empty

chalice and we’d take our place beneath

the big crucifix and I’d feel his shoulder

beside my shoulder and for a moment

or two we were happy and not confused

about the bedlam we’d left to go to mass,

the rat that dashed past the chicken-

coop, the toilet bloody and our mother

in bed and some of that blood on her head.

She laid out and I covered her and stood

in her breathing and said she’ll be

ok, she’s sleeping, and today I think I don’t

know her at all and maybe my brother

didn’t either, but it’s snow that makes me

think of her that way, and the Goya

painting I stared at, but it wasn’t

the nude, instead it was The Madhouse

and the men in feathers and tricorn hat

and yes they’re mostly naked too but

it wasn’t that it was the shadows and men

in them it was the looking at them inside

the cold stone room, how could it not be

cold? and all of them, some clothed some

the one in the dead center, who? is he

shooting a someone aimed the way he is

and the man kneeling to the left what’s

he doing blowing a horn? into a crumpled

man’s head?  Every one of them has a story

left to mold and ruin.  Soon enough I’d

close the book and go out and pull

sixteen or more inches (three days ago it was

fourteen) off the roofs of two cars

and move that habitual melancholy that the end

of winter brings because everything

that falls out of the sky has to be swept

up and stacked in a neat pile, and while

it covered my tracks I thought ‘what’s

my brother doing just now, home alone

on a job layoff, crazy bored?  What are any

of us doing just now, on the other side

of the asylum wall?  Isn’t our ear

to the stone?  Isn’t our sanity tucked

away behind the linens of our tabernacle

and aren’t we only feet away from being

inside bedlam, like a Goya eye, naked

and proclaiming nothing but a tender throaty

song, thank you, whomever, she’s still

alive when we get home from mass

this time, and the light in the center of her

face makes her safe and her rages

maybe, maybe not today, a Sunday,

or ever again on any day, to keep

the sky from coming down or lifting

up, to keep us from asking how far

are we, her children, how far are we

from, tell me, this bit of madness?