The Disaster Cover
This is my blanket
My daughter called it a blankie when she was a baby
Now I feel babyish and call it the same
You can get underneath my blankie, like so—
Or I can embrace you with it—
You’ll feel warmer
You’ll feel babyish
You’ll fall on top of me like an exhausted lover, under my cover, and
I’ll feel the weight of your world crumble on top of me.
We’ll both feel safer, in a blanket
Even though nothing has changed
Your side will be by mine and and that’s the final place I want it
This side of my blanket
is the soft part, the part you hold against your cheek when all the other soft parts get
blown to bits
And this side of the blanket
is the fuzzy part—
the side that stays fuzzy even when the picture elsewhere gets all too clear
Here’s the dark part of my blanket
The place where I wanted to rest my eyes forever—
But my memories leaked in like sunlight,
And my eyes grew so red they’ll never sleep the same again
I wish I could make the bad smell go away with my blanket
The smell of gypsum and flesh and ashy shock
I could wipe it off the face of the earth, I could wipe myself off the earth,
I could tell you why all the loose ends ended up that way,
If I had one more chance, one more yarn, to make it right this time
I have a fantasy about the whole world
It’s made out of whole cloth
I guess there’s no excuse for it
I have a love
For a big city that took me in its arms and
Covered me
With blossoms and snowflakes and soot as thick as grease
I have to stop talking about you as if you’re dead
I know you’re only bleeding, and you’d welcome
my dry hand
I ‘m covering you in white linen
When you’re ready to defy me in red silk
I tell you I’m ready to take you in tatters
And you tell me to stick a needle in my mouth if that’s the way I’m going to act
Okay, I’ll shut up
Instead of blessing you and damning you,
I’ll just cover you
The way I’d like to be covered
So close, so bound together, so sooty and greasy
That nothing will ever tear us apart
I wrote this poem on Sept 24, 2001, after the bombing in NYC. When I wrote it, I was also thinking about when I was pregnant in 1989 in San Francisco when everything fell into the sea and shattered... the Loma Prieta earthquake. I dug out this poem today thinking about my friends in Japan, wishing I could imagine a "blanket" big enough for this.
Image Credit: James White made this poster, I found it at boingboing.
