Fossilized

I do not wish to begin, so I slowly peruse a cataloged catalogue of words.

Suddenly I am fastened upon the word “linoleum”

(I know from certain sciences that it was once made of solidified linseed oil,

but that in my time of living it is nearly always fashioned of polyvinyl chloride).

We poor folk know the word and its appearance in the world, for it covered our

hallways and kitchens and living rooms and bathrooms,

but sometimes there was carpet or a rug mixed in (though no one ever really noticed).

I don’t fucking know what she used on her wrists.

All the gods that are false, damn it, damn me,

shrink this earth like uncured leather

so that I can no longer taste in my own unsacred mouth the iron of blood,

so that I can know less well what she set free in her turmoil and her anguish;

may my bones be ground into meal for failing to stay that dreadful blade.

I shudder to speak but I am less than a weaver of lies.

Sometimes the truth cries for the telling when I do not wish it,

when I would give a thousand rubies that shimmer like as many suns

to never tell of what I know. I suffer less than she.

Her hair is very dark and she often wears it tied in one loose knot

and she returns, scars not yet set upon her arms, to find that

the man she lived with had left the blood that seeped upon the floor, he left it

spattered on walls and in droplets around the bathtub, he left it

for her to clean.

I don’t know if she used some formulation of ammonia to scrub her horror,

some different, natural, caustic cleansing element, or a synthetic relative. I did not ask.

Although I was miles away, I can see her there, stoic on her knees,

hair like night from dye that he once asked her to apply, a reddened sponge in her hands.

Could she have washed it all away with only water if she had added her tears?