What Bodies Contain and Cannot

WHAT BODIES CONTAIN AND CANNOT

i.

She stood barefoot, calf-deep in the brush.
She held the loosed stone from the wall.
She dropped it.
The bird died.
The bird had been dying.
She understood: it all happens in one place.

ii.

The bougainvillea laced the fence behind her
while someone fucked her farther and farther away.
She thought of jars filled with warm water.
He thought of a hand underwater setting free a small blue fish.

iii.

She was like an attempt
to gather a flock of clouds
into something solid.

iv.

She couldn’t believe the symmetry of her own ribs,
how the doctor could point,
say there, that smudge, that blurry thumbprint.

v.

When she dreamed she had her virginity back.
On waking she thought:
there is little sad about it. I couldn’t ever feel it anyway.

vi.

What was inside that bird.
What was inside her.
Her easily broken, bowed ribs.
Her appendix, nothing more than a bean.
The bird, nothing more than a bird.

vii.

How could those perfect bones
have been inside her?
She hadn’t the fingers for the piano
but her ribs looked like hands
holding everything that made her beat,
just barely, in.

viii.

When she left she found
the body holds what it cannot touch.
A whalebone corset tightening around
all those vegetable-shaped insides.

ix.

Her body was no cage.
It could not have held a bird.