——For my husband, Martín Espada
——–—For the first year, the sacrament
of leaving groceries on the deck
for the virus to die, sacrament of
bleached exteriors of jars, boxes,
and cans, of strip-and-shower
as soon as we came from anywhere,
clothes cast to the basement, heaped
like the flayed flesh of saints
on the concrete floor. Next, the sting
of isopropyl alcohol and the latex
second skins on our fingers, then,
finally, the masks, bat wings spanning
our mouths for two long years after.
——–—And did you know, love, that there are
eleven species of bats in El Yunque
where we will never see La Mina
or La Coca, or feel the fall of their fresh
waters on our skin, where we will never
run our fingers over the cold stone
of the Yokahú, or see, from its heights,
Cloud Forest or Palm, the towers within us
already eroding, me, already rash-splashed
and coughing, bats too early whooshing
in my lungs, carving paths to mango, guava,
and agave, their teeth munching the crusts
of crickets, chinch bugs and beetles, their tongues
glorying in the thorax and in the dusty forewings
of moths? I descend and descend further,
sickness raking through my blood, the inferno
of my trunk and skull on high, though at dawn,
——–—while I began to rise, then you—
Many think of hell as a hot place, apothegm
of fire and brimstone, an eternal fever
where flesh curls off bone in unholy folios,
but for Dante, hell is cold, locked in ice
in the center of the earth, waterfalls fanned
by a windmill of bat wings, so it should come
as no surprise that, six months later, on the coldest
night of the year, bleach bottles heretics beneath
the kitchen sink, you would collapse, my arms
barely enough to catch you, to lay you down
on the floor, sick, unawake. You sailed away in a skiff
of your own skeleton, bobbing in the caps of a choppy
river, the bearded Charon’s gnarly toes curling
around your clavicle. When with my thumb
I tugged your eyelid, your pupil expanded
into universes, infinite and black, and you,
in that infinitesimal flash, are light-years away—
the light-year not a sizing of time but of distance—
and in this moment, which stretches back
to Paradise, you are far away in both, though
lying still on the floor where I lowered you,
your fingers pinching the bridge of your glasses.
——–—At the eclipse of your eye, I made you
the site of my apostasy and played out the myths
of a million madnesses where I would split you
open, gullet to hip, slip my whole body into
the Eden of your viscera, and till you as if you
were earth. I would gnash the black-red gristle
of your liver, twist loose your canines, stroke
their edges with my finger, scratch your name
into my wrist, I would scrape your marrow
with my fingernails, snap your ribs one by one,
and rebuild a You from you, a trellis to the sky
of thy kingdom come, I would plant in the sponge
of your gut, fecund and wet, a Genesis of heliconia
and hibiscus, and forever tend to the brief
and peculiar bloom of the bromeliad.
——–—For I know now that the Expulsion was not
for a luring but for a laying down, and that I, no
longer faithful to the myriad delusions of bleach
or belief, am doomed one day to suffer it.
I have already felt its brushes, love, the breeze
I’ll never know at the top of the Yokahú,
the flower I’ll never coax to a second bloom.
Lauren Marie Schmidt is the author of four collections of poetry: Two Black Eyes and a Patch of Hair Missing; The Voodoo Doll Parade (both from Main Street Rag); Psalms of the Dining Room (Wipf & Stock); and Filthy Labors (Northwestern). She teaches at the Academy at Charlemont.
Photo by Maik Winnecke on Unsplash
