if seeing is believing

We had been married for six or seven years when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me that she screams underwater when she swims—

that, in fact, she has been screaming for years into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool where she does laps every other day.  

Buttering her toast, not as if she had been concealing anything, not as if I should consider myself

personally the cause of her screaming, nor as if we should perform an act of therapy   right that minute on the kitchen table,

—casually, she told me, and I could see her turn her square face up to take a gulp of oxygen,

then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious. For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming as they go through life, silently,

politely keeping the big secret that it is not all fun to be ripped by the crooked beak

of something called psychology, to be dipped down again and again into time;

that the truest, most intimate pleasure you can sometimes find is the wet kiss 

of your own pain. There goes Kath, at one pm, to swim her twenty-two laps back and forth in the community pool; 

Here’s a seed. Food for a week. Cow skull in the pasture; back room where the brain was: spacious hut for me.

Small then, and smaller. My desire’s to stay alive and be no larger than a sliver lodged in my own heart. 

Crisp is to the apple what flexed is to the body.

Poor apple.

Being bitten is to the crisp apple what walking is to the ripe body, but it’s more complicated than that:

the apple of the face has been given to the running juice of the body

and the body, which is often gracious, makes it shine.

Lucky apple.

Having a core is to the apple what having a core is to the body, city, method, circumstance, endeavor.

Having a core is flower-shaped and hurts in the way that having a shape hurts, which is to say

it hurts ironically, because to have limits is not just to make a declaration upon a mountainside,

it is also to be the mountainside. Having a flowering core also hurts in the way that being flower-like always hurts,

which is to say sexually, as if the whole self has exceeded the skin, which it hasn’t, which means

we always seem to be opening but never ever do. Both these types of suffering color the air

when we pause to have them. The affected atoms are hard to see amongst the billions

of sofa atoms, newsprint atoms but, like the illnesses in the crystalline sea, they are there.

Red apple sliced, quartered, salted. Green apple,

alone in the basket. Anything left on the shelf becomes weak,

suggestible, vulnerable to other shapes, hungry to be refilled by something other than itself,

a poison apple. The joining we do with others needs containing.

Apple pie. Imagine the mess. Imagine a finger touching the sack of the heart.

Imagine being stopped, controlled that powerfully. Imagine nothing like that being possible. Nothing ever stopping you

at the root of the breath. Huge apple. The world in reference to you. How you move. Time a backdrop.

Or close the other eye: you in reference to the world. How it varies and happens simultaneously.

But sometimes I forget where I am, Imagine myself inside that life again.

Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps, Or more likely colorless light

Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.

And when I begin to believe I haven’t left, The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke

Climbing the walls while the hours fall. Straining against the noise of traffic, music,

Anything alive, to catch your key in the door. And that scamper of feeling in my chest,

As if the day, the night, wherever it is I am by then, has been only a whir

Of something other than waiting.

We hear so much about what love feels like. Right now, today, with the rain outside,

And leaves that want as much as I do to believe In May, in seasons that come when called,

It’s impossible not to want To walk into the next room and let you

You wanted to know “love” in all its habitats, wanted to catalog the joints, the parts, the motions, wanted to be a scientist of romance: you said you had to study everything, go everywhere, even here, even this ice palace in the far north.

You said you were ready, you’d be careful. Smart girl, you wore two cardigans, a turtleneck, furlined boots, scarves, a stocking cap with jinglebells. And over the ice you came, gay as Santa, singing and bringing gifts.

Ah, but the journey was long, so much longer than you’d expected, and the air so thin, the sky so high and black. What are these cold needles, what are these shafts of ice, you wondered on the fourteenth day. What are those tracks that glitter overhead?

The one you came to see was silent, he wouldn’t say “stars” or “snow,” wouldn’t point south, wouldn’t teach survival. And you’d lost your boots, your furs, now you were barefoot on the ice floes, fingers blue, tears freezing and fusing your eyelids.

Now you know: this is the place where water insists on being ice, where wind insists on breathlessness, where the will of the cold is so strong that even the stone’s desire for heat is driven into the eye of night.

The children have brought their wood turtle into the dining hall because they want us to feel

the power they have when they hold a house in their own hands, want us to feel

alien lacquer and the little thrill that he might, like God, show his face. He’s the color of ruined wallpaper,

of cognac, and he’s closed, pulled in as though he’ll never come out; nothing shows but the plummy leather

of the legs, his claws resembling clusters of diminutive raspberries. They know he makes night

anytime he wants, so perhaps he feels at the center of everything, as they do. His age,

greater than that of anyone around the table, in a room from which they are excluded,

though they don’t mind, since they can carry this perfect building anywhere. They love

that he he might poke out his old, old face, but doesn’t. I think the children smell unopened,

like unlit candles, as they heft him around the table, praise his secrecy, holding to each adult face

his prayer, the single word of the shell,

Hearing a low growl in your throat, you’ll know that it’s started. It has nothing to ask you. It has only something to say, and it will speak in your own tongue.

Locking its arms around you, it will hold you as long as you ever wanted. Only this time it will be long enough. It will not let go. Burying your face in its dark shoulder, you’ll smell mud and hair and water.

You’ll taste your mother’s sour nipple, your favorite salty cock and swallow a word you thought you’d spit out once and be done with. Through half-closed eyes you’ll see that its shadow looks like yours,

a perfect fit. You could weep with gratefulness. It will take you as you like it best, hard and fast as a slap across your face, or so sweet and slow you’ll scream give it to me give it to me until it does.

Nothing will ever reach this deep. Nothing will ever clench this hard. At last (the little girls are clapping, shouting) someone has pulled the drawstring of your gym bag closed enough and tight. At last

someone has knotted the lace of your shoe so it won’t ever come undone. Even as you turn into it, even as you begin to feel yourself stop, you’ll whistle with amazement between your residual teeth oh jesus

There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell. Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four: he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him. Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam.

The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth, fear, we have tried and found useless. The fifth, nothing happened, is dull. The choice is between: he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between these