Near death, sometimes the hands curve
into themselves like claws.
I held my mother’s open, smoothing
the fingers, trimming the wild nails.
Once, years before, my husband and I awoke
to a fawn caught in the family compost,
a hole on its back end festering with worms,
and he pinched each one out
swiping his little finger in the bowl
of the wound, then coating it
with antibiotic salve. I loved him,
and how he saved this small thing.
It’s a story I have told over and over.
Today though, I’m thinking of the medical uses
for maggots: biodebridement and extracorporeal
digestion, their enzymes liquefying
dead tissue in wounds, and wonder,
do I feed off the dead
who live inside me? When my mother was dying,
she had a vision of her non-corporeal
father, brothers, sisters. Her last words,
Why have you left me alone?
She never opened her eyes again,
her chest a drowning well.
The bodily signs of death:
the skin mottling as blood flow slows;
breathing, open mouthed; jaw, unhinged.
I won’t recount the signs of a dying marriage,
but he left two days after her funeral. Physically,
he returned but told me he’d fallen
in love with someone else,
that his love for me had passed.
Above my mother’s body, orange mist
had exhaled and dispersed, a light bulb
busted open, its luminescent gas escaping.
The word fluorescent is so similar
to the word florescence, meaning flowering,
and somewhere between these two,
there is a splendor I can barely stand.
Inflorescence refers to flowers clustering
on one branch, each a separate floret,
but if they are tightly clustered
as in the dandelion seed head, they look incomplete
alone, though the whole is an illusion.
The word for this—pseudanthium—means “false
flower.” Infrutescence, its fruiting stage,
gives us grapes, ears of corn, stalks of wheat,
so many of the berries we love.
This morning my hands ache
as though in the night I’d been trying
to claw my way out of a hole
I am down in, having lost the body
I came into this world through, and my husband’s
as well. It’s almost as if my body
had come to believe his was a part of its own,
a connection he would have to break or die.
Medical experts say it takes two moltings
for maggots to do the job well,
to feed enough to clean a wound. I do not feel
clean at all, though in our shower,
my husband and I still huddle some days,
hunched into the spray. We call it watering.
When we do, we scrub each other, grateful
for the living, dying flesh, but trying to get clean
of each other. That fawn he saved way back
when we were new in love
was released into the wild. Surely, it had a scar
identifying it, evidence of what flesh
my husband was willing to enter
in order to keep something alive. Lately,
he seems more clear-eyed, and it is as if a cicatrix husk
is cracking. Neither of us know who
will emerge, but he seems luminescent,
a kind of light created by the excitation
of the smallest elements, and not giving off warmth,
but a cold glow that at least illuminates.
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