watched her sleep before she died. The color of shame is blue. The wind would begin to blow, the sun would be rising and Isaac would hope Lena would wake, throw off her sheet, take him to her, but still she slept while outside the sky kicked up sheets of blue. When I stood beside her bed, I saw the end of blue—the color of her lips beneath the shroud. Love and death. The space between, where I search. Isaac would have been so tired. He didn’t think what he should have been thinking: What if I should wake? What would Lena do if I saw him, an intruder on the balcony? Would she say nothing and watch him carried away, a possible burglar or pervert? Punished, for by then I would have seen him and known him and let him be carried away, exposed. He wouldn’t think any of these things. Instead he’d enter the open door, lie down beside her. She’d wrap her body round him and they’d sleep. With the morning light on their still bodies, he’d open his eyes, transfixed at the sight of her next to him. They’d never slept together. They’d made love but never slept, never woken in the morning as one. Lena would get up. She’d come to the marital bed, to our bed. Would he wonder if I would make
love to her, roll toward her, wrap my body round her? Imagine her shift to lie in my embrace, the shape of one instead of two, the ease of our joining in the morning light, of what sustained and might have continued to sustain us. Still, Isaac lay in the double bed. He should leave, escape, be safe. But he slept and dreamt: Small, narrow bones. He holds a tiny femoral in his hand and takes a fine scalpel. He carves the opening, the flat, reedless embouchure. He carves the tiny holes for his fingers. He lifts the perfect bone to his mouth and blows. He hears the sound, the clear note, the call of the thrush outside the window, and he’d wake. I see them. She went to him. She did not speak, she did not get in with him. She went to the bottom of the bed, lifted the blankets, laid her cheek against the soles of his feet and wept. He lifted the blanket away from his body. He was erect. She kissed his feet, covered them, came to his penis and folded her hands around him, briefly, not to arouse or to bring, but to comfort. She said, “You must go.” And he did, out the back, over the deck onto the hill. She stood on the balcony, her body, the angle of her hip, the shadow of her breast through the gown that blew against her in the breeze. Like a breath of blue. ∆ 13
ALL THE THUNDER