From Chambliss Drive to the Outer Banks of a Journey's End
by Jessie C. Badillo

The massive steel post is rusted
and tips starboard a mailbox that
shelters a nest of a robin's blue eggs
under the livid lilac of an oak tree.
We sniff summer off our toenails.
The sun's chin on the rooftop rests
as a kindergartner's finger-painting
on scrap paper that would be torn
anyway, smiles over frantic screams.
A flock of squawking geese herald
an annual migration to the South,
where poetry is deeper as leaves
are greener, veins exuding with
vernacular hymns. Hawks unwind
feathers, cruising on turbulent winds
looking for their prey. A while back
lemon grass dominated the rims
around a swamp by the bedroom.
A giant stork strayed by the rose
garden where a smashed arch begins
to disentangle its frame of ambition.
Pencil lines roam along the eyes of
a daybreak and coalesce into sun-
rise, the smell of omelette skirling
through nostrils in its suddenness,
washing the morning silence and my
aphid reverie to pause life into secrets
that fade and break through gaps
in the fingers I am spreading across
the French doors to the bed of purple
coneflowers where a spider crawls
on fringes of its country of cobwebs.

In this radiance, I still cannot feel my
left footpad that rests on sharp claws
a nightmare has scattered over tiles.
I can hear my heart, the palpitations
that agitate like the surfs along a shore
where I was born witness to a solar
eclipse. The taste of salt pervade
a sultry breeze where there is no
ocean other than that I see through
the film of a morbidly distant memory.
I take these digital keys and a mirror, lay
back to hover over returning shadows
deep in the subterranean enclosures
within my brain, inaccessible to knives.
The hospice hexagon switches on, its
magnets grumble, a laser beam streaks
apart another hour and entombs me in
a gadolinium tub bath, for a baptism.

"O Mary conceived without sin.
Pray for us who have recourse to thee."
Do not move, your head or body, his
voice glowers, as if in dead panic, this
needle will only be a little prick . My ear
plugs jiggle in their microtunnels; my
ice of scalp strains for release. I am
at the top of the Himalayas, a condor
just about to raise its massive body
above the wake and drift of my struggle.

Underneath wrinkles and dust of heaps
of poetry drafts, there lurk suggestions
in the text of wind and passing urges. I
open the palms that ache with hopes,
momentarily aghast, stunned by a lance
of pain through my shoulder and chest.
A flock of terns sprawls across the sky.
The bay is at its most serene, just a log
afloat near feet I am digging into sand.
There's a hermit crab somnolent in its new
home, under the sculpture of a driftwood.
I breathe out the rage and wipe off words
scraggly on spreadsheets, worms, leeches
that aggravate, that defeat, that annihilate.

November 1, 2006 – May 3, 2007 – July 25, 2007

© Jessie Badillo

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