Free You Must Remember This by Michael Bazzett Page B

together.
    Instead we fell asleep, tongues
    heavy in our mouths like fish.

When They Meet, They Can’t Help It
    His obsession is a cart drawn by muscled oxen
    over rain-softened roads. Salt marsh spreads evenly
    on either side. Reeds stir like fine hair in the breeze.
    The land seems flattened by the heat. The wheels
    crush white bits of shell into densely packed mud.
    Her obsession is a small animal gathering seed husks
    in tunnels beneath the snow. The owl listens for the
    dry scrape and scuttle. The bird blinks once as the
    animal stills. The images collide here, in this moment.
    The cart on the road is real. It exists in the resolute now,
    drawing sand toward a work site near Dakar, where the
    driver will sell it cheaply to make substandard cement.
    The owl and the small animal are real as well, moving
    through boreal forest in Siberia, they possess a reality
    of sinew and ligature, of worn tooth and cracked beak.
    Without these images, neither obsession could be seen.
    The man lives to deepen grooves. The woman offers
    motionless chill to mask her alertness. He is attracted
    to this stillness at the coffee shop, sensing the appetite
    through faint chemical signals that stir both arousal
    and fear—if pressed, he could name neither impulse.
    His persistence seems to her a steadiness that could
    calm. Conversation over coffee leads to a coupling
    neither can quite believe, a coupling in which they
    open like strange flowers. In the emptiness afterward,
    while the silence holds, he thinks of what they’ve done
    and is aroused once again. It seems that he will do this
    forever, in and out of years, until she is an old woman.
    She looks at the ceiling and wonders, What’s the sound
    skittering across the roof? A cloudburst? A raccoon?
    If either speaks, this will come to an end. These things
    are fragile. Yet just as he opens his mouth, an airliner
    thunders overhead. It cancels all sound and saves them.

Clockwatcher
    The night is not a hole
    to fill with your thoughts.
    It is not a sock to stuff
    deep in the gob of morning
    and hope the sun has
    soiled itself there on the couch
    where it collapsed after the gin.
    The sun can be so tiresome.
    The night is not a black dog
    snuffling around the muskrats.
    The night refuses to stumble
    through Byzantine circuits
    like loose electricity. The night
    has no limbs. It never stutters
    or grabs. It settles in like
    a headache: there before
    you know it then a pressing
    darkness stained with light
    and you wish you’d taken
    that handful of crumbling
    white pills before it came.

Atlas
    When they lead you into the room with the blind man
    and let him drag his hands across the landscape of your face
    so that you can smell his old skin and those yellow nails
    that have begun to curl like claws, you will stand straight
    and still and swallow your revulsion back into your throat
    because once he has confirmed the bones of your face
    fall into line with his memory of the bones of your father,
    he will offer a tobacco-stained smile and a wine-tinged
    exhalation and announce, yes, you could only be his child,
    all the while fumbling for the greasy string around his neck
    to withdraw from inside his shirt a key that still holds
    the warmth of his chest when he drops it in your hand.
    The map is in the box, he’ll say. The box beneath the bed.
    You expected worn parchment or carefully folded vellum
    but not this sturdy clothbound book. It is not merely a map.
    It is an atlas, replete with indexes, charts, and translucent
    overlays that display your various organs, followed by veins
    and arteries traced in red and blue, and then the delicate lattice
    of nerve endings that lace your body. The fine white crescent
    scar on your forehead is indicated with an asterisk to footnote
    the make and model of the car door that delivered the blow,
    back when you were a boisterous child. The final overlay
    takes care to reproduce the actual melanin of your skin tone
    and quietly