Still Life in
Landscape
It was night, it
had rained, there were pieces of cars and
half-cars strewn,
it was still, and bright,
a woman was lying
on the highway, on her back,
with her head
curled back and tucked under her shoulders
so the back of
her head touched her spine
between her
shoulder-blades, her clothes
mostly accidented
off, and her
leg gone, a long
bone
sticking out of
the stub of her thigh—
this was her her
abandoned matter,
my mother grabbed
my head and turned it and
clamped it into
her chest, between
her breasts. My
father was driving—not sober
but not in this
accident, we’d approached it out of
neutral twilight,
broken glass
on wet black
macadam, like an underlying
midnight abristle
with stars. This was
the world—maybe
the only one.
The dead woman
was not the person
my father had
recently almost run over,
who had suddenly
leapt away from our family
car, jerking back
from death,
she was not I,
she was not my mother,
but maybe she was
a model of the mortal,
the elements
ranged around her on the tar—
glass, bone,
metal, flesh, and the family.
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