Letitia Chan

The way my doctor goes about it

seems to allude that anything is a well

some distance from total drainage.

It is true that my body has endless

things to say to you who touch me

through the sleeve of this day mist.

The earth was made too vain to consider

that any one thing must gones for another

to preen. All of the parts of me keep

reaching like mimosas for touch

and killing themselves. In the last of my most

hopeless weeks in Boston as it was slow

wintering my only pleasure was to drink

glass after glass of orange juice by myself

watching what could have been the end

of my life. But I don’t think I can ever

be finished; I’m in love with far too many

countable things. And there are all their names

to learn. Whatever you say I’ll plant

a thousand flowers to retaliate. Always

you want to be special in your nothing

but there is the pail of your body working

against its own current insisting

with unweary voice there is no end

just water on water on water.

I can come but still I cannot meditate.

Before these months, when I saw a bathtub,

I did not dare lie down inside of it,

knowing I might begin to dream of physical

cloud and epidermis, and come apart

as completely as I had dreamed.

As I had feared. So many sensations.

But you know, I tried this last night,

as I went through my meticulous list of

trying, top to bottom. I lit the expensive

candle on the windowsill naked in

my bathroom and admired the stained

marble, and thought of all the things

I was afraid to forget, but could not

know them, nor find reason, and when

in the morning my mother came in

exclaiming she smelled the candle,

I said I did not. For this is how,

whatever is apparent to you I do not see.

While the white scented body of wax

was slow waning there was no pleasant

smell, or any smell at all, only

the self in the throat, slowly diminishing.