Читать книгу Terrible Blooms - Melissa Stein - Страница 16

Dead things

i.

This is the season of dead things.

Bat curled up on its back, frog broken open

to the meat, a turtle’s pixelated shell.

And all the frantic honeybees.

As a child I daily encountered such death

when the air was close or thundery.

There was the flipping over,

the poking things with sticks.

Look what I found, smeared and bloated.

Look what’s living in it.

ii.

Hawk stood along the path

as I jogged past. He eyed me sharply

but didn’t stir. His ankles had these surprising

little cuffs. When I looked back

he took off into a blur of coral tail, gray wing.

He shrieks around the property

to frighten small creatures into hiding

and picks them off while they scurry.

In this way his cry pierces doubly.

iii.

She was nearly gone

by the time I went to see her.

A nurse was dampening her lips

with a coral triangle of sponge

and she was rasping, a little louder

when I sat next to her and told her I was there

and loved her though who knows if she knew

though they say they do. Her skin

had grown a size too small. Her eyes

that were ice blue were closed that day;

because I’d missed my plane

I missed their final opening.

She died early the next morning.

I held my mother’s hand through this

though we hadn’t spoken in a year.

I’m next, she said. I will be, too.