I would no longer know
your real face in a crowd.
I only recognize wax paper
skin, bedsores, baldness and thrush;
the you that looked melted
in the sun: a thalidomide.
This you had spread through
memory by the capillary
effect, like the expanding
puddle of your piss—the time
you yanked the catheter
and wet the bed. It has
intervened and overwritten
the rest. Now it is she who
sighs at a six-year-old me
when, sitting down for supper,
I stretch my middle finger
then ask what it means. And it’s
she who preserves my front teeth
in a glass of warm milk, holding
it between her thighs as we drive on
the road’s shoulder, at seventy-five. Now
this mother parody monster conquistador is
the woman I forget to thank. I remember
the alarm bell clanging
of your car key, and
how they heralded the end
of Saturday afternoons; dust
ground into the grain of
Kelly green corduroy, turning it
olive drab. I would duck down,
drag out the free time. Crouched behind
a hedgerow or lying under the car,
all I wanted was for you to leave
me alone. Now this creature comes
lumbering to retrieve me, bring me home.
I’m a drinker these days. An atheist.
And I no longer live in Ohio. But
two years into your afterlife,
not much has changed except
the whys and ways in which
I hide from you.
(2004)
