A Little Ode for X. Sometimes I call X nostalgia.
My mother telephones her fear of snow caving the roof in.
She hired a man who rakes it off every time but today he's sick.
And so my mother paces room after room
watching the ceiling.
When she hangs up, I imagine her face
resembling the crisp fly wing stuck on the storm window
or her raisins heated in pans until they dry out,
although their bitterness ruins cakes.
Last night a child threw a stone hard against my front door.
That's X, too, for I've no farther to chase him away.
Now I find the stone on the step, milk crystal so strange.
I wash my hands over and over in the kitchen
sink afraid the child soaked it for hours in poison
from his Christmas chemistry set.
X is a fifth time a friend says no to dinner,
preferring to polish heirloom silverware until the garland
handles gleam, or my brother's letter from Florida describing
a fight with his third wife.
That feeling of ants in my father's chest, red fighters
circling his heart that night he sat up in bed sure of death,
that's X, the specific hum of blood feeding against a cloth
in my mother's leg.
I hold a mirror behind my own knees touching the blue tubes,
running like routes into my body,
finally an equation for X, as it, too,
now grows by subtraction.