SUSAN ELBE

With a Leaf in Her Fist

1

Yellow wick

already burning with the world,

pneumonia wheezing in my chest
and myopic,

delighted they said in everything—

           September’s buttermilk sky,
           summer’s breakdown
           swinging manic through
           the Trees of Heaven,
           the light,

everything about light.

2

Call me the sunflower kid
the honey-bee baby
grandpa’s blond muszhee.

I was the first.
And my mother’s last.

3

I came into a house of things that needed fixing.
Stuck window sashes,
           running toilets,
                     singing faucets.
The beat, beat, beat of the pipes.

I came into a house of things that couldn’t be fixed.
A whiskey-warm kitchen corner,
            cancer growing in the alcove bedroom,
                      the fridge’s lonely hum.
The ungraceful way we understood.

4

This coming into.
It was like.
It was not like.

My arrival yoohooed over fences,
tongue-flap,
and wing-flap on lines

against a wash of bruised clouds.

My fist opened and closed,
sunlit then shadowed,
a hinge.

What a morning.

5

All of it, a fuzzy puzzle.
All of it, a paradise.

6

Then.

I entered the drift of years,
spiraling up wind tunnels
and snowing,
snowing.

I ate the gristle
and I ate the fat.
I sucked the sweet glass dry.

7

Until.

The days got colder,

memory as blurred and claustrophobic
as the oil stove’s flame
leaping behind isinglass.

           The crumbled leaf.
           Black butterflies.
           The burning.

8

And the burning, still.

9

Do they bury the dead without shoes?
Do they stitch their mouths shut?

Don’t dig a hole for me.
I’m flying by the seat of my pants.
I’m citing chapter and verse.
I’m barking at the moon.
I’m going up
in smoke.