Postpartum.

POSTPARTUM

   day: take it apart: not day. Pull the vein of midmorning,
   softly, with tweezers: coil on a stainless steel tray.

   Glass on your bureau
   slices the light, spackling it onto clock face

   the day is not long nor scheduled nor marked by light show
   what is said about days is not so

   any longer had it ever been so
   not day, a haunch of animal:
   raw, dead, injected.

        When not injected or recently pricked: shivering.
   You wonder is this the way I can count the time?
      Sets between fits,
      seismographically insignificant fits, accounting sweat drops,
      tick off crumpling fingers.

   You feel certainly that you should benefit. Would benefit
   from a pill or some: make day=one thing+next thing.
   Next thing+next thing+happens+

   inject?+traction makes it go+so so so: Day.

   Midmorning, you fi nd the sideways sun accommodating, polite.
   Conversational: you are prodded, pleasantly, a maybe open orange,
        being in a something that feels like a mitten or
      the sound of soft palate but not the actual, you get a
      coiled, threaded softly around the fingers like a reminder,
      but gentler and lest this turn out to be not so and it is
      always not what you want, so yes

   Midmorning lies. Like that terrified limb do we know if
   its pain is phantom or if it is, what if it is
   phantom and ghosts like that of bodies like that
   are what you feel and when you

   say: this hurts and this hurts and this and this and that. The
   blanket hurts too, day-touched, mood-swung, fi brous and
   receptacled: the sun rising to apex means to

   kill. Should you be able to lie naked under this sun, you would
   be healed is
   what you say if only you could