I Know Why I Make the Past A Destination  

I remember the ivy,
the way it whiskered up the brick
of the hospital’s old wing,
its broad, red-edged leaves lifting,
drowsily, like paws.  So beautiful,
and disturbing—its tenaciousness,
the way it seemed to insist climbing
was the only natural thing,
while, across the lot, the new glass wing
I waited in shivered like a mirage,
like a rib that had been extracted from a cloud.
We don’t need medics to push you,
these things run on tracks now,
the doctor said, and he looked familiar
in his white coat and corduroys,
explaining how now it was possible
to get a map of every illness you’re likely to get,
or to die from, in your life.  

I kept looking past him, at the vines outside,
those burnt hands curling,
thinking it’s always been frightening
to be alive, the way we can almost,
but never quite, remember the future.

I’ve traced fate on the underside
of a hand, and on a leaf,
but that was quaint,
nothing like it would have been once
to pass your palm, damp and shaking,
across a table to the reader you needed to believe.   

It must have felt something like this—
sweating under a paper gown, swallowing blue fluid,
buckling the body and its unknown future to a table
that inches persistently forward under slicing light.  

Always this stillness before you divine.
 
 
 

The Animator  

It’s terrible work for the lighthearted.
I meant to do cartoons or video games,
but the law firm had the only job I found,
doing reenactments.  Each week,
a lawyer sends in a single-spaced brief
and I begin again the history of blame.
I order the events like a dog-eared deck
of cards, show how a lover’s finger
stiffens, in increments, as it pulls a trigger,
or the way a semi-truck can ricochet
and swipe a van like a bottle over a guardrail.
Once, I had to follow underwater,
make the father unbuckle all three kids
before he ran out of air and couldn’t kick
the windows free.  The children’s hands reached out
like starfish, their hair rose into golden bells,
but their faces—I had to make their faces blank.

Mostly, we concern ourselves with things,
frame the flight of a bullet as it tears
through a jacket, into the dune of a woman’s breast.
Did you know bullets explode into roughly drawn stars?
Have you ever seen cells rush in to sluice a wound?
You can almost hear the body’s coalition
roaring with rage.  It gets predictable
as science fiction—skin a desert crust
over red drifts of tissue,
ribs the battened hull of a mother ship,
and the blood, the minions and minions
of diligent soldiers.

My job is to direct the juror’s eye,
so I cut a little beauty into every frame—
maybe a rain-slicked street ribboned with headlights,
a maple leaf or worn gold ring.
But the best it gets is when I spend all day
with something small and concrete—
an axle, say, or a buckle— something
that failed through no fault of its own.
 
 

Rachel Webster grew up in Northeastern Ohio, on the banks of Lake Erie. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Blackbird, The Southern Review, Rattle, 13th Moon, The Madison Review and the Oyez Review.

She has received the American Association of University Women Award and an Academy of American Poets Young Poets Prize. Currently, Rachel lives in Chicago, and you can see more of her work at www.myspace.com/rachelwebster. Contact her directly at rachelwebster10@hotmail.com.