Two poems by Deirdre O'Connor
The orthodontic model
of my teeth, for instance—
I remove it from its box
gently as a doll brain
might be lifted from its skull.
Whose finger wore this fake ruby ring?
Who carried beaded evening bags
and kept them half a century
before they landed here?
From shaken-out squares of velvet
come crumbled roses,
clipped obits
the size of postage stamps,
infant curls in envelopes.
And here’s the rabbit’s foot,
the parquet darning egg,
bivalve shells with gardens
of Japan painted inside.
A ponytail wrapped in plastic
looks like a little chestnut mink.
I can pretend it’s still attached
to the person I was becoming
when it was scissored off—
or the person I stopped
becoming, all the people
I meant to keep
inside, those by accident,
by chance,
and those I would not have
imagined living
as long as they have in me,
no one else knowing.
just now drowsily climbing
from bed, the first time
without mother hissing
the human witness back
to the other room?
Or does that open the door
to indulgence? Tiny bodies
with outsize paws
crookedly stepping
and grasping
at yarn, not to mention
the laser
zagging its red line
across the wood floor
where lately there were tears
overhead, overheard,
perhaps, by the cat,
heaped underneath
with creatures who care not at all
for sadness, how it emerges
gluey as newborns then shambles
beyond the soft confines
in which it was fed.
