Rachel is ecstatic, sparks of static electricity traveling
to, from and between her and us
She may have rubbed her back on a charged shag rug
Yesterday her last sunset in her 20s
5:04, only the sun’s orange cap, 5:05, cap sinks into purple haze,
Sky smolders
In French, the anesthesiologist and I critiqued the Deer Hunter
since I grew up in Pittsburgh
and there was no time for pain killers
The other doctor caught her
Her perfectly etched rose lips
in minuscule
A child who droops at crepuscule. The
partial darkness, the haunted transition.
A child attuned to melancholy.
Though she could stand in a blue wooden door
and shout at the wind: Va-t’en, va-t’en!
Born under the sign of empathy
She went to neo-natal
I went back to my bed, sighed;
picked up Crime and Punishment
She’s always opened me up
Simultaneity: that brown baby gaze pouring itself
into its beloved (at three months), again, now,
those soft defenseless gazing eyes
Haze is creeping on one side, as if everything we are seeing
is through memory
Are we getting sentimental
Trees wear their fur-lined glove inside out
Eternity parallels the horizon like orange crush
No beginning or end at either end
And all the dusk netting, then night netting
The sister weavers do their work by feel
Drunken shafts of light filtering through the weave
of cypress
Monterey, to be exact
As she paints her burger with an exactitude of ketchup,
she wipes each plate as a fresh daily canvas.