I don’t know how it happened, but I fell—
and I was immense, one dislocated arm
wedged between two houses. I felt some ribs
had broken, perhaps a broken neck, too;
I couldn’t speak. My dress caught bunched about
my thighs and where my glasses shattered there spread
a seacoast; where my hair tangled with power lines
I felt a hot puddle of blood.
I must have passed out,
for when I woke, a crew of about fifty
was winding stairway beside my breast
and buttressing a platform on my sternum.
I heard, as through cotton, the noise of hammers,
circular saws, laughter, and some radio
droning songs about love. Some ate their lunch
on a hill of black cypress, all blurry; from the corner
of one eye I saw my pocketbook, its contents
scattered, my lipstick’s toppled silo glinting
out of reach. And then, waving a tiny flashlight,
a man entered my ear. I felt his boots sloshing
the fluid trickling there. He never came out.
So others went looking, with flares, dogs, dynamite
even: they burst my middle ear and found
my skull, its cavern crammed with dark matter
like a cross between a fungus and a cloud.
They never found his body, though.
Now my legs subdue
that dangerous sea, the water bright enough
to cut the skin, where a lighthouse, perched on the tip
of my great toe, each eight seconds rolls
another flawless pearl across the waves.
It keeps most ships from wrecking against my feet.
On clear days, people stand beside the light;
they watch the waves’ blue heads slip up and down
and scan for landmarks on the facing shore.