Whiting Award Winners

Who can give           an account of occasions

Can     mechanized description so falter

Can move toward gesture to scissor the outline

Each to enable a series of seconds    breaking or burning

Can undo the work of a million years         of human love

if I curse you just right

I saw inside the body of a man. The intern drew me

through the otherwise locked door; still in my hands

were eight glass vials the pharmacist had sent for,

to keep the glittering permanganate. That was my favorite task,

the weighing and dilution of the violet douche,

administered before the hysterectomies. In autopsy, he’d opened

like a box his arms had fallen from, neither looking at me

or away. As if he’d come through wind,

his hair was mussed. There was a funnel and a drain

inside the floor. And today I saw a sidewalk in the woods,

the handsome wooden cages and the smallest gravel pearls

smoothed around the bottoms of the trees, and then

a shock of feathers lifted on the damaged eagle’s head.

And the kestrel was afraid. Its open wing, so rarely looked down on

is gray, rust, black, and gray again, and black, and I have,

once today, felt my body drawn across its gaze. That one

with the vivid dragging wing, and then from underneath

I felt the other hovering.

As Isamina Belle confided later, when she stepped in her front door and saw her husband hanging from a rope tied to a joist, with his head bowed as if in prayer and his feet dangling inches from the floor, the first thing she did was to hasten and fling open all the windows in the house.

Child or woman. Memory or need. Today, again, I can see you

in her eyes, today her eyes again pursue the ground, look

for some sign, some path to follow away from her route.

Her sweatshirt is zipped to the throat and I am realizing that

we are both then, somehow ashamed of what has suddenly happened

between us. And I’m slowing down a little, as if to let

the spring sun catch up to these hands on the steering wheel,

to these hands that will not ever stop needing breasts to

make them hands, as if to uncover my mouth

and yell across the lawns to her.

When the ferry berthed at Picton, the American was to purchase two one-way tickets back to Wellington; one under Healey’s name and one under his own real name; he was at present travelling under a false name. He would pass over both these tickets to Healey and then disappear for good. Healey would deposit the American’s ticket in a rubbish bin on board. Then at a certain point in the voyage, when it was dark and they were towards the middle of the Strait—this was important, the American had told him, because of the currents which might easily drag a body far out to sea—Healey was to raise the alarm that he had just seen a man jump overboard.

The ferry would most likely be stopped and Healey would have to take a role in looking for the missing man. He would have to be ready to indicate how the figure fell and from where exactly, what he was wearing, what he looked like, and in none of these details should he be too precise. It was dark. No one else was on this part of the deck when it happened and Healey himself was on an upper deck and saw it more or less out of the corner of his eye. No, the man did not shout or make any noise as he jumped.

We do not mean to complain. We know how it is.

In older, even sadder cultures the worst possible sorts

have been playing hot and cold with people’s lives

for much longer. Like Perrow says,

We’ll all have baboon hearts one of these days.

We wintered with ample fuel and real tomatoes.

We were allowed to roam, sniffing and chewing

at the tufted crust. We were let to breathe.

That is, we respirated. Now the soft clocks

have gorged themselves on our time. Yet

as our hair blanches and comes out

in hanks, we can tell it is nearly spring –

the students shed their black coats

on the green; we begin to see shade.

Lo, this is the breastbone’s embraceable light.

We are here. Still breathing and constellated.