Vaporizer

A charm, a dream of protection. Gurgles hold the night light’s glow. A stream of clouds misting the branching tubes. Water, in fog, a tub, plug to wire in the wall saying Okay, it’s okay all night. *    *    * School, a door closing he opens: haze of playground French, the five names for different kinds of marbles, games, bullies he wandered among while I was staring at the sea. Shut off, not my past, nothing I could do— I keep making up all the world he lived. His new name, intricate drawings of aliens, long tunnel of lunch (Mais il ne mange rien monsieur)— school hours shadows that smother my days. *    *    * Burnt-out hills: char and velvety ash along the dropped limbs, magpies, new gullies. A dry time clears the ground. He was standing where the road split, arms spread, a small x straddling the crack. That bird call a slash, then, on the edge of things. He was standing, behind him the green blue of ocean, the white blue of sky. *    *    * The house of childhood sold, or razed— not lost but softened, distended: diaphanous linked chambers springing from a lightshaft or a varnish smell, the way a floorboard aches, a scrap of wallpaper tunnels the heart. *    *    * A film of “events”— tiny collisions, tracks of light in the bubble chamber—you’d scan for hours (smell of formica, rock headsets, eyes going furry near four AM). This celluloid memory now your memory, coursing chemical fissures in the brain. Matter split like time, thinner and thinner parings— Anything that happens is too fast to see *    *    * There the sky kept reeling as she ran— wisps, then puffy clumps, then rain— the park spread low beneath the blanketing. Who could have worn that purple coat cartwheeling in the grass? It grows as I look at it, puts on pillowy layers. Now the coat wears memory, warms a ghost. *    *    * Wind off the world’s top, whipped clouds over hedgerows: Girton, that one year twenty years away. He learned to walk, she started school, read, slowly, the first book Red. Moss edging the garden wall, little flags on the clothesline.