Book of Dog. Cleopatra Mathis

But how would that work

       when he needed her to be there

       in order to make her gone, disappeared

       into other. What other? she thought, wondering

       how to make herself into someone

       absent, so she could be the one

       he would welcome, wide-eyed, wanting

       to hear whatever it was she had to say.

Labyrinthitis

       1. When it began

       First a fret in which everything changed.

       By morning an underwater language

       had overcome me.

       When I tried to rise

       my body said fall, and so I did.

       My weighted hair, my head

       turned me over. I could not hear him straight.

       I was a doll with a mechanical box, the Mama

       crying over and over, a dummy,

       a dropped marionette.

       Hold me, I said.

       So sorry, he said.

       2. Not making sense of it

       If he was calling, I was too far under—

       arm over arm

       tangled in the heaving wave,

       the body catching

       the slap of stones,

       swept through a passage.

       The brain’s sea in a little box

       washed in, a spinning top

       come to a stop. Tilted.

      •

       He was walking some inert shore.

       Always the lifeguard, he used to say,

       eyes fixed on the water.

       3. Nevertheless a common disorder

       Some infection in the water, a nastiness

       washing through. At first an incidental ache,

       then recurring, inflaming

       the air-filled cavity of the middle ear—

       who knows how it starts,

       how it finds the inner ear,

       a spiraling labyrinth,

       the fluid-filled temporal bone

       where two organs live: the embedded

       nerves for hearing, or mis-hearing,

       and, in a semicircle of canals, the home

       for balance. Never

       one without the other.

       Somewhere in there should have been a marriage.

Canis

       It was a small comment, wasn’t it, about who they were

       —that last year on the dunes when all the town talk

       was of coyotes, prairie wolf in search of an ocean,