O, Errata

 

I found the “o” in “zero”
while erasing myself,
transformed “zer” to “veer”
through substitution. I mean
who would notice such a thing,
a turn so easily overlooked.
Oh me oh my. Where did I flee,
where do you go. So much
room in “o” to disappear. Or 

to stuff all the characters who
aren’t working, to create new
words, whoops, worlds. Eros
for instance. Re: so. Oh boy,
error. So very near and dear,
this intimacy, my regarding of
erotica inherent in curves
surrounding a “supposed”
empty space filled with glory.

It’s easy, you can type them
inside, and then liquid paper
them away. Did you know the
inventor, Bette Nesmith Graham,
was a poor typist, and she
concealed typos with fast-drying
white tempera painted with a
watercolor brush: what a smart skid.
All the other secretaries 

wanted supplies. So Bette sold
her correction fluid company
for $47.5 million in 1979. That’s
one H of a resurrection, I’d
say. The New York Times
finally ran an obit of her
in 2018, in their section O-
verlooked, with a correction
about a detail that was just

plain wrong. Reflectory, refractory,
what kind of “o” have we found
ourselves buried within. Certainly
full of missed tombstones
and many maps with unreliable
topographical inquiries. I beg
your pardon, we were talking
about the womb, and many
still lives there, many unborn

who exist somewhere outside
the alphabet, always on the lip
of the here, not quite a presence
yet always within us. Very expansive,
the pelvic cavity: generous one
could say, no? Muscular, possibly
fertile. It’s where we all begin. We
just seem to forget about it, all too
soon.

 

 

My Unborn Child Says to Me

 

Wiggle your fingers.

I still don’t know if I’m dreaming.

Can you see me?
Suspended in a large flat plan, like a desert.
It’s like the remainder of the earth—

I’m turned
sideways. Cloth over my head.

The better to get at your hip. 

I hear a saw. 

So do you see me?
Dust. Particles of ruins hang
in the air. Welcome to the remnants—

It’s Bach.

They’ll put you under, again. I’ll remain.

What kind of in-between world is this.
Hemispheric reamer. Voices I can barely
make out. Metaphyseal fixation—

I can see you now—

*

Your arm reaching toward mine. There it is.
Sleeve of a worn blue windbreaker, the wrinkled nylon,
weathered, the navy shifting. It darkens
in folds. The cuff flipped back. Pale.

Your hand reaching toward mine. Fingers fleshy
almost like a baby, but not quite. As my hand reaches.
Your torso caught back behind the haze, though,
as if held frozen, captured in ice, or under the sea—

1. Hello.
2. Are you coming closer. Or leaving.
3. Do you have a favorite color? Why do I think it’s every faded shade of sky. 
4. What makes you laugh?
5. Your cells are in my brain, they circulate in my blood, they settle
6. in clumps in pockets they pool in the cavities in my torso. . . .
7. Am I pulling you from both directions. In other words, do I want
8. to meet you but also not want to meet you. So one part of me
9. pulls one arm back into the fog 
10. while the other pulls the other arm out toward me—
11. what do you think?
12. How is your spine doing with all this pulling.
13. Mine is losing the in-between parts, the inner spongy 
14. jelly.
15. You know how that goes.
16. I may be counting because I like to make sense
17. but it doesn’t make it true.
18. For fifty years I carried you within me, 
19. one of 2 million eggs
20. traveling a ghost loop from ovary
21. to fallopian follicle to the fimbriae 
22. of the tubes. Not reaching the
23. endometrium. Absorbed
24. back into me, into my cells. Not reaching
25. endometrium. 
26. Knot. A network of roots connecting what appear to be different trees, 
27. an entire forest,
28. but they are trunks of one organism. 
29. Roots grow into each other, interlacing, fastening
30. together.
31. A stump stretches out to the young nearby
32. and they to it. You
33. lay in my fetus.
34. My mother’s.
35. Cradled in her mother.
36. Traces of sound and scent, of form and weight, inscribed
37. inside our bodies,
38. line by line
39. through generations.
40. A remainder is what’s left over in a division problem.
41. We find the remainder using long division.
42. Long. 
43. When the dividend is not completely divided by the divisor, 
44. the leftover value is called remainder.
45. You, there.
46. This joining, this intertwining—
47. is not necessarily
48. secure. 
49. Stay near.