Because you will not talk
about your mother’s hands
or describe further the meat
of her left thumb almost gone
as if eaten down to the bone,
and because it is too early yet
to imagine your mother’s breast
brushed with prep gauze, held
in some nameless palm,
an attendant knuckle There
to mark just above her nipple, we run
along the piers, coughing
at the near-spectacle of Edgewater,
its lights adrift in the river
between here and New Jersey.
If only we could say something
about the beauty afforded to us
by distance and the prospect of loss
instead of spitting at pigeons
and kicking at wastebins. If only
there was something else but pictures
in my skull—these images of antibodies
and magnets in solution, a doctor’s vow
to take arms in the half-life
of whatever we have to finish it off.
When you gesture at a trash barge,
the seagulls in their furious circles, I see
a convocation above the heaps,
white cells gathering at the tips
of all her cooled syringes.