failed avoidance of 'the body' in a poem

after TJ Jarrett

your therapist wants to know where

in your body you most feel your anxiety.

you tell her in the bones

behind your face. they have their own

music, like ptolemy’s universe,

and chirp like shuriken

dancing in the road. your therapist says

you hurt because there are things

you’ve never been taught to do:

how to hold yourself in sleep.

how to drive. how to live with men.

back when you were five—or maybe four—

your father knelt before you for the last

time, close enough

that you could smell him, a zephyr

of kool’s filter kings and leaving.

he pushed the tricycle toward you, purple and white

streamers limp as hair on the handlebars.

by the time you mounted the cranium-shaped

seat, he was gone.

your new goal is to learn to breathe

through bones, to make flutes of them.

although, in reality, you are much more supple:

a crooked fold of flesh that comes so quickly

when called. you are the warm-bellied

animal on the shoulder,

coated in sunscreen and your father’s curiosity:

white-haired possum with his green, green eyes.

you’re now the oldest you may ever be.

you have never before been this afraid.

there are no bodies bound to rush in the room

when your own becomes a bullet ringing the tiles.

you know all about “love’s austere and lonely

offices”: checking your stools for blood.

checking your breasts for lumps. checking your neck

for swelling nodes. checking the locks,

the coffeepot, all the cracked

eyes blinking fire on the kitchen stove.

your own weep against a pillowcase

you haven’t washed, stiff with the

miasma of your hair. you stare

at pictures of the girlfriend grinning in sunlight.

you feel bad for not being taken with yourself more,

but your body is all asymptotes and fractals.

your own skin splinters in the dark

from your dense heat. the pieces

come back together under a halo of prescriptions

steeping your head in yellow light. sometimes,

while combing your hair, a sliver of cartilage

lodges in your finger pad. you lick

the glittering blood and spit out the shard.

compared to your father, this is not unkind.

somewhere between your skull and the skin

that swaddles it, all the songs you didn’t know

you needed to learn from him appear

and vanish with the rhythm of your breathing.