The Opposite of 8

My daughter and I hold hands
walking
on the way to school
along the muddy gravel road
strewn with layer upon layer
today's dead
piled on yesterday's
piled on the day-before-yesterday's
dead leaves.
A pastiche.
A heavily shellacked collage.
She chats merrily,
unaware of the morbid turn
my thoughts have taken.
This road is built on the bodies of the dead, I think.
Just like the famous road through Siberia
where the dead bodies of the laboring prisoners
- thousands upon thousands of people -
were just packed in amongst the layers
of rocks necessary to build a road
so that fools with fancy motorcycles
and video cameras can prove their ability
to travel to the edge of the continent.

She is swinging my arm so enthusiastically
I have no choice but to listen.
Ogres and gremlins, um-hmm. Hiding in these woods. Yes.
(Maybe we are not thinking so differently after all....)
I would not miss this fragile moment:
eau de decomposing leaf,
crisp air, wool sweater and this person,
the embodiment of life.

Reflection on Transparency

When my body dissolved
I was 21,
new in a strange city
and my younger sister
had just died
opening the door and walking through it;
taking most of me with her.
I continued being a housekeeper
and going to grad school
but no one seemed to notice
that at an accidental touch
their hand passed right through
my skin and bone.
Often I felt like a balloon on a string.
People thought they were talking to me
but I was really hovering outside myself above.
Unable to get back in.
The longer I went without hugs or touch
the further I drifted
from my corporeal mooring.

I accosted a young man
who had been kind to me in passing
one day after work I begged him for a hug,
which he awkwardly obliged.
I was beyond caring about perception
it was all about not slipping away entirely.
Not waking up involuntarily invisible.

It took 9 months - a gestation,
to earn a friend worth hugging,
someone to tug me down
and back into
these outer trappings
everyone puts
so much stock in.