Damage
by Helen Wickes

Damage, today I’m obsessed with damage.
The cored-out heart of the rose, not the bud
or the bloom, but root to flower—

whatever’s maimed, blemished, blistered, harmed,
this skin the talon, the thorn has hooked—
morning’s minion, ha—

and those shreddy clouds the sky assembles
only to have something fun
to tear into pieces. I remember Vuillard’s painting awash

with parlor knickknacks, his floral decor so chintzed
you can’t tell carpet from chair from curtain, can barely see
the old woman dying quietly in her rocker.

Down the street, in the corner shop the hollowed slabs
of ribcage swing. From the café radio
Janis Joplin’s ropy voice,
almost present, then static, then gone.

Something gleams from the hubcap, saying,
It’s evening, you lived so long,
what have you done? Answer it back, oh hubcap,

some things can’t be lived through—
the bolus we grow around—but there is
some endurable affliction,

the abscessed hoof sliced back until it bleeds;
we pack in the mud and wait and hope
enough foot grows back to nail on a shoe.

The long days are marked by waiting by the phone,
by the door, by the mailbox, and the sense
that the days themselves are passing.

Helen Wickes was born on a farm in Northbrook, PA. She lives in Oakland, California, and is the author of four books of poetry– In Search of Landscape, from Sixteen Rivers Press, 2007, Dowser’s Apprentice and Moon over Zabriskie, both from Glass Lyre Press in 2014, and World as You Left It, from Sixteen Rivers Press, 2015.

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