Homeopathy
A poultice that I made in the yard,
as you watched from the hammock
we’d strung between the oak tree
the first owner planted and the side
of the garage. That poultice was
a success, you know, it dried up
the boil on my left cheek. I came
to see it as a misplaced third eye
but brownish-green instead of white
and unable to grow its petals.
I’d thought it would last forever, either
full to near-bursting and fetid
with every wrong word I’d ever feared
I’d said after a second glass of wine,
or weeping, as when your eyes
wouldn’t meet mine, and I knew
you were ashamed of my thick tongue
That poultice was mostly clay and smelled
of sulfur, but it dried up that boil
and I felt instantly lighter. Like I’d been
to confession, assuming I believed
in that little room, with its screen
and the conference of absolution.
**
Ocean Floor
These things I set adrift, each piece now sunk
to the ocean floor, and resting. Like tiny pebbles
and notes from my husband on the kitchen counter
that I’ve read, now hidden here behind a picture
frame or pinned with a paperweight. An act
of intentional forgetting. I think of them sinking
on their way to the bottom of the ocean and wonder,
Are they pinned, even there? Ink from a ballpoint pen
smeared and faded, warped paper disintegrating
into nothing ten thousand leagues down, but never
dissolved, those pebbles gather near the bases
of boulders, like silent congregants.
They belong to me but I am unready to name them,
afraid to call them him or her or them or us.
Watching the tiny pebbles slip, each falling
through the garbage disposal, passing by the blades,
spinning but not catching even once. Tumbling
through the pipes, crashing into their metal sides,
clanging in a deafening display of resistance
but then freely through the U-bend like a miracle,
until they find the fresh rush of sewer, a conduit
of memories snaking its way back home, under the sand
and past those reaching fingers of the undertow.
