When she stopped knowing anything at all

1) WHEN SHE WAS YOUNGER

Airport.
She overhears an angry businessman
leaving a voicemail:

“I’ve already been discarded by one
person at your office,
so let’s see if you call me back.”

She winces, keeps moving to baggage claim.

Later, in the car, she thinks of this.

“High-maintenance,” he jokes, in the driver’s seat
of his 2,438th rental car of a lifetime. And counting.

She is suddenly crying, without sound.

“What are you doing? Asking a question? Telepathy?”

She nods.

“Are you getting the answer?”

“I think so,” she says, wanting to be
low-maintenance. Low-mileage.
A lease.

2) WHEN SHE WAS OLDER

“Don’t pity me,” he says.

“I only pity you if your life looks like this
all the time,” she says.

“I’m sure some of it is this—”
Curved hands, beside his eyes.
Blinded by parenthesis.

3) WHEN HER TOES WERE PAINTED

She definitively cares and does not care
about:

her hot pink toes,
her cheap wedge sandals,
her penchant for red wine,
her unceasing treasure hunt
for Pandora’s boxes
and for questions like

What is true?
What of this is real?
Does love matter?
What is love?
Don’t you hear me?

Nothing original—no, deadly trite, really.
Just high-maintenance questions
poking sawed-off broomsticks
into the tender shoulder blades
of easily irritated lesser gods,

who wheel around
swear like sailors
and fling stories to Earth,
stories that spin themselves,
stories that need no particular
storyteller at all.

4) WHEN THE GAS TANK WAS FILLING

Usually she is the one asking questions.
At least, this many in a row.

“What do you think? Could you?
Would you? Could you live it?
Could you survive it?”

“No,” she says.

“We’re lucky,” he says, putting the gas
cap back on.

5) WHEN SHE WAS VERY YOUNG

She was a passenger in a brown car
(he will surely tell her it was not brown).

The car was full of no one
she can remember now.
She sat in the backseat,
on his lap, with no seatbelt.

But she was not afraid.

We get to have this,
his eyes said.
We are young, this is ours.
Nothing bad happens, trust me.

Later
(after the sand lit itself)
she held his photograph
on trains and planes.
Gray sweaters and
Halston cologne made
her swoon. This, she
decided, was the adult knowing.

She thought she knew before,
but the other he had gone away.
Maybe now this was knowing,
for real.

Knowing,
the way children know that
every single seed will yield
a flower.

It takes a lot to screw that
up, in their book.

6) WHEN SHE STOPPED KNOWING ANYTHING AT ALL

She can put her finger
on the precise moment.

There was a bang, a snarl, a hope—
triggering a whimper, and a monkey grinder.
Dental floss, Payless shoes, turpentine.

Her watch stopped with the big hand on
this can’t be happening o’clock

and the little hand on
half past we are bigger and better than this

The date reads:
11999 I WANTED TO BE WHAT YOU WANTED 0000.

The seconds hand? That works,
but it only counts little girls and
their barrettes and the funny
words they say, like articulatative.

She bought another watch.
It says it is 2010 but will never
promise to tell time again. Oh.
Wait. Perhaps, she thinks, she
has purchased a calendar.
Never mind.

Let the other hes and shes of the world know.
They give each other simple rings and can rest.
Her heart swells. She wants to touch that
knowing again, then wonders if for some,
once the knowing goes, it is gone for good.

For now, she busies herself breaking down
the nesting boxes on the back porch,
discarded from Christmas bounty. Someone
has played Santa from far away this year.

She’s lucky, she thinks. Yes. She’s lucky.