After She Left

Shaker Meeting House
Women's Entrance
Canterbury, New Hampshire

After She Left

I know you stay away:

you stay away: and why you stay

away you stay away to stay

silent you stay away to save

your face to face away from the day

she made her way out

the door and left you looking

through the squares of the wire screen

and something in you broke almost

clean through and because it didn’t make it

all the way to the bottom

and through you curled there

on the almost solid spot of it

and did what three-year-olds do who

want their mother in the compact cold

of it all: you shook and swayed and made

do with the balled up edge

of the blanket and the ache that made you take it

into your mouth isn’t it recreated

every day for years and years when you wait

for her to make her

way back—but in the spaces of she may

and she never will, you continue

to grow up and that shard-bed bottom is,

is, it sometimes is, high as you are on your climb

out of there still solid still awful dark

and it suffocates you sometimes

and lately in the last decade of your living

you’ve learned to soothe it through

by the deep draw and clutch of the smoke

and she’s gone from you in a way

that’s almost ok and you don’t

say anything you play it sane you

stay you stay away you only say

unwords to that little boy she left

standing patting that screen,
then sitting in front of the old

house, the old mesh door, it’s still there

same place, though lately you have taken

to going in another way and that place

that tore on her rings as she fumbled

for her keys, the three

corner tear that flapped sometimes

unrepaired was like an open cheek a daughter had

neatly sewn up when she was four

after being mauled by the family

dog, that screen still flaps if the wind’s right

it’s small, it catches the quiet breezes

it’s where you reached for her once

she didn’t turn around leaving you not even a

I’ll be back for you baby I can’t stay I’m sorry

and you made it up to your wrist

with your fist through that hole and pulling back it was

only a little bigger, only a little,

and it looked down on you like an eyelid

drooping in sleep when you curled up and began staying

away day by day safe on your cleft floor after you fell

after she left.