(

(

From time to time the placid

shrugs its shoulders—

earthquakes, for instance.

                                Jane Hirshfield

                                Milk

Eyelash is an open or closed

parenthesis, depending on

its innocence.  Here it wants me

to consider all the space

it holds off for its own,

on the lower margin of a novel,

the cream pages breathing

in and out with my eye

on the story: I keep I see

I read about three people

on a beach.  It wants me,

small lash that it is, to consider

turning a page over more

slowly but I can’t forget

three paragraphs above it

was a dead ant, stuck on this

sentence:  “The baby slept on

in his arms.”  There’s a spot

of ant oil (what else would you

call it) between ‘his’ and

‘arms’ after I flick the black body

into the trash.  I’ve borrowed

the book, and I’m sure it’s past

due.  In the story a man is learning

how to swim.  He’s afraid

of the water and he’s just come up

for air.  It’s someone else, someone

who has a deep, treading water

grudge against him, who’s holding

his daughter in his arms.

There are loaded guns

and there is hesitated blood

everywhere.  But only hesitated.

Like when the book shut down

hard enough to take

the ant’s life but not hard enough

to squish it.  It was still so perfect 

I thought it was alive

when I turned the page.  But it

had merely been stuck waiting. 

Like the eyelash of some previous

reader: opening is an aside.  I

almost want to pluck one

of my own

and place it some distance from her

possible new companion, going

on to give its curve to catch

the rest of the thought, to consider

the next move.  But the story

isn’t read yet.  It’s written—

and some of it’s gone by me

in boats and stolen cars and bullet

holes.  And a drowned mother

who is still

alive in this bit, and crouched

“Japanese-style” which means

submissive? or spring-loaded?

Could mean she’s weak? Or

could mean she’s dangerous?  And more,

much more than the man

with the gun on his knee and the baby

in his arms gives her credit

for.  I’m here to tell you it pays

to read the parenthesis, even if

they are open, like cummings and his
experiment: (a

                     le
                     af
                     fa

                     ll

                     s). 

They are keys, secrets, like a ciphered-wink

between two people, given

quickly, but measured, while everyone
else looks somewhere else: to book

to pages to what's left to take
in to spine, to the entire binding…

while the father in the water

while the wife, while the baby

while the criminal with the gun

                                                                   )