At the Cincinnati Art Museum
We come for the air conditioning. We air out, climbing the stairs
with our sails aback, Vanna Whiteing to heaven.
From here, we whisper sweet nothings to the Madonna.
From here, you find me in Italian paintings: selling flowers,
my hat loose from my hair.
How the marble feels on the sole of my foot, stolen out from my shoe.
How vessel can be both a boat and a bowl.
At the Cincinnati Art Museum
Many mechanical things: Tiffany clocks, the Pete Rose Warhol.
Rookwood pottery. TVs welded into a man, each part of the body a face.
Watching my coworker massage our client’s hand open from a fist is not the same thing as
massaging his hand open myself.
The manual Hoyer lift is a spindly, attentive thing. It bows like a parent over the bed.
Like anything with an absence, it suggests a body.
A body suggested into the sling.
A body suggested by the lever, pumping the sling up & up & up.
I do not know why I notice its absence, here, in the museum.
This is my day off. You follow me into another room.
We watch the light through a seated glass dress, the wearer missing, her body present in its
folding.
Rotating her wrist as slightly as I could, I’d file a client’s fingernails. The emery board took its
time. We were not to trim them with a cutter. It’s too easy to tear the skin.
There is a third body: the one that guides the Hoyer lift through the door.
Remembered: when his fist unfurled, the palm of his hand was red from his untrimmed nails.
Remembered: how he refused to release the spoon from his bite, and the sound the metal made
against his teeth when pulling it out.
Third Shift Aubade
My coworker, in
the room just over.
The door open.
Her book open
on her chest
having fallen asleep;
two hours til
her first class
of the day.
Little shadows
now longer.
My client, asleep.
The TV, mounted
high, flickering low
over his face.
Hard breath, mouth
up. Pulse oximeter.
Clipping on his
finger, slow, not to
wake him. The binder
in which we record
his vitals. Blue ink
blued out under
the thin light.
Ninety calorie almond
wrapper, empty. My
notebook empty of
the love poems
I hoped to write
while they slept.
Too little light.
Too little me.
The bright unhappy.
