The Door

From the beginning, play it back.
You as my apparition. As my gauzy dragonfly, bride-red,
bridled, skimming a sunken lake
dragging your skein of blood.
Then the reverse. The sky thudding shut. 
Scrape of nails across the moon. And you’re gone.

What I remember: a spray of opaline flowers just gone
white. Rain, sour in my mouth. Moss against a fence. Lying on my back
under the glare of a hospital light. The door slamming shut
as I watched a tv doctor tell a woman what the blood-red
stain could mean. Then the real doctor talking. A galaxy dwindling to blood.
One little life to be grieved. The shock of the fall to an underworld lake.

I was there after, floating in the mold-green ladle of a boat. Watching a lake
of birds fly low into cold winter sun. I looked & looked where you’d gone.
Finding only ice-creaking skeletons of trees, a hiss of blood
under ropes of snow. Then the ringing silence. Thinking, Give me back
the little story of it. That shadow, joy. Wishing I knew what all that red 
had taken from me. Red the story opening, & red as it furrowed shut.

Next the anesthesia. Rush of water. Gray lichen curled like smoke. A shudder
as I went under, teeth chattering, learning to breathe under the lake.
Dreaming of you in a music box, turning, of a lakebed too frozen to dig out. Red
hands stinging with cold. Sorrow on velvet, exquisitely rubied, gone
to rest in an undersea shrine. And isn’t that what I wanted? To go back
to the bottom, to be stuck there, forced to make ink out of blood?

To know I could still be hurt into beauty. Pain under fogged glass. Blood
like a whip cracking open a mirror. How familiar, this trap. Shuttering
an open fan of could-have-been lives. And me trying to claw back
my easy love, my wanting pebbled with grief. Why couldn’t I see the lake
would disappear, drying up until all the water had gone?
The long shoreline fossilized with dead, the sky burning its red

omens? Warning me, surely, that I have read
this all somewhere before. A story of ruby-bright blood
burning to ash, then wind, then nothing. A woman on a barren plain. Gone
the little petals unfurling, green moss in the crease of a tree. So I shut
my mouth around all of it. Swallowing it hard. Encasing the lake’s
trees in ice. I wanted to be my own book of revelation. To keep it & never go back.
When I asked for this inventory of red, when I said to play it back,
that was the mother speaking. Slamming her bloody hands against the lake
like a door. She was there & gone before I knew her. Before & after. Open, shut.