DNA
Time also a helix tightening or loosening the material from which we’re made. Just think how things oppose each other—sense and anti-sense, death and rebirth the same year, father gone, the floating messengers inside us transcribing the past. Sister beginning to unravel a broken phosphate that is suddenly a dream of windows blown in, curtains fluttering. Dark separates from the light like an oil: a bad day in the third grade now a voluble history, mute matter looping back as memory and intrusion. Think of her other dreams, all her teeth gone, a child in her arms, then her arms suddenly empty, she’s kneeling in church, her kerchief askew, her boyfriend at the apartment passed out in the bedroom. She tries to sing as if music were coming up out of the kitchen drain, this her art making and being made, her left-handed spiral offering its song, where love and the lost child and fear are a triple-stranded moment still twisting among the clouds in an unspeakable distance that every morning is so near.