When she held my head in her lap,
she said she saw something beautiful.
Like tulips, or imprints on a color slide.
 
She was trying to say that she, at least,
loved me. She knew I spent mornings
alone gathering vertigo like a grudge.
 
Gathering and emptying, taking apart
the slow house of my mind. The walls
I'd built, the pictures I'd hung on them,
 
the windows opening wide out on all
the color photographs of lives blooming
 
without me. Sight left, and the floaters
waxed. Like white chalk, or fingernails
on a tender membrane. And I was there:
 
not in my sandblind face and its sockets,
or the figure in the mental room who took
the last bulb out. Not in that body of mine
 
folded out like a wringing cloth on a rack,
and pinned right through the mandibles
like a pair of pale fish tossing in the night.
 
Picture her. Cradling my head in her hands,
as softly as a sunlit globe, peering into my
pain for something forgiving. For tulips.