Visit

I try to tease you
out of memory but I come too
late in the day. I climb a machine
to mend a snapped thread and
fall in. You’ve been on your feet
through the night shift,
you say. I don’t want to talk
about it. You gesture, help me
to the door, settle me on the chair.
You float away through a closed
window. Your hair gets caught
in the vent’s lint and now
it’s white. We are circled and rung by
our worn dresses in the spin
cycle. All the televisions
are set to Good Morning America,
yours to Despierta,
América. You reject
donated afghans that mimic
heirlooms. You won’t put
on your glasses or use the phone.
Under the dinner tray’s dome
there might be soup, but it’s already
cold. What you can’t hear is always
an insult. What if I read your hands
to learn what it means to rove,
that middle process before
thread can become the bedsheet
on which you lie unbidden
by history. I study
stern girls from good Puritan homes
who worked in the Lowell mills.
Aren’t I like them, worshipping
in the factory owner’s church, sitting
with the sick, writing hymns and poems?
Isn’t this a borning room, for birth
but also death? Aren’t my questions
the metal brush that rips
the guide’s hands
as he dehulls flax? Aren’t I the
guide?