The Corpses of the Future

Neurologists posit a number of steps between a thought and its expression.  In other words, a thought can really move, 

Stretch out its hamstrings, run in place then leap, landing beyond the cirrus cloud, inside the geological survey, its grid colour-coded and intact. 

Or, it may behave like a drunken slattern at her toilet, atomizing with Avon Crystal Aura and drawing on her eyebrows with a burnt match; 

I am Gloria Gaynor, the thought – originally an ominous MasterCard bill – spills out of a low-cut, nylon-trimmed rayon slip. 

Mid-trip, the thought may change tack or list with ennui, retreating to its bachelor pad, a cushy, crenellated line – 

This is something I talked about with my dad, more or less. 

That is, I talk without talking, as he does with the bombs are poised to detonate, or the cyanide capsules are breaking open in the chamber. 

Meaning, naturally, that he is trapped in a violent ward filled with screams and heavy doors with recessed numerical code-boxes; 

That he is blind, and locked also in the dark that spreads like a stain until everything has been soiled; 

And that his words too are captive, on occasion, when they mutate memory, emotion impairing their objectivity, as when someone has died 

Long ago but it feels new and this is not news, I feel the same. 

My sister is visiting my parents. She tells my father that she saw a groundhog at the bus station this morning. 

“Where was he going?” he says, thought and language fusing into a key that lets him out and lets us in, and we laugh, it’s that simple. 

If, when Dad gets better? I ask my mother on the last night I am there, then fall asleep. 

I see my pillow expand and rest beneath my father’s head; watch it wrench open and snow over us both until there is no pain. 

I want to give you this gift, I say, and he thanks me, as we grasp the air like newborns, at all of its harmless magic and forgetting. 

When Dad gets better, I would make us coffee, my mother says, then sit with him in bed, talking all night. 

Her dream reminds me of an incubator I saw for newborn sea horses, so few of whom survive, 

Those golden, constant lovers – 

I latch them to my heart, and nourish them: so much rests on their tiny shoulder. 

Still, they prevail, in their resolute, ill-starred way.