World Backwards
For Joanne
The worst storms start out of sight
in the ocean and head for land. Islands
flatten before them
like the chests of old women.
It is cold in the waiting room, my mother
shivers
in her favorite sweater, wipes the drip
from her nose with a ball of tissue. I wonder
what it is like to worry
how much of yourself you will find in your own head
with each new day. I only know what it is like to get lost
in a book.
The one I’m reading now says
there once was a prosperous Diamond City
off the Carolina coast that twinkled
like candle-lighted windows on the ocean,
where a gull could catch a breeze and coast
a mile and mighty whales dared men into the sea. Survivors
of the final big storm dug through the sand
wreckage
for shutters and clapboards, dishes
and curtains and moved
the city once and for all to safety. Someone opens
the door and calls my mother’s name,
which she always knows
though she sometimes forgets mine. We move
to the doctor’s examining room, me
hauling all our bags
and packages behind her
and still lining them up as the doctor
begins the ritual: “What is the year? The season?
Remember these three words;
I will ask you to recall them later: pot, shirt …”
My eyes are pulled to the window,
where a black rope of cloud lies tangled
in the white and gray sky to the east
on this late summer afternoon. I think I hear thunder
threaten far away. My mother has finished
the counting by sevens now and is trying to follow instructions
to fold a piece of paper in half and put it on the floor.
“Half is not all,” she tells the doctor, stalling. He
smiles indulgently, but she is right.
Half cannot sparkle like candlelight on the waves
or glide like a wind-seasoned gull
or drown in the ocean. Half
survives and moves bits of Diamond City in skiffs
to Harkers Island, and now half is on the floor
with one task left
before we move to safer ground today.
The doctor says:
“Spell ‘world’ backwards.”