- She brackets his world,
- her love, her daily work
- the uprights that wall away the void,
- holding in what good remains,
- keeping him fed clothed cosseted,
- safe within the bounds she sets
- as old echoes drown out current voices,
- familiar doors and furnishings move themselves
- to confusing, bruising positions,
- memory invades present time to make
- her pale, white-rimmed face
- not that of his freckled, red-haired wife
- but of some frightening stranger.
- Muscles, organs chart their own aberrant courses
- tipping him over,
- pinning him to chairs,
- sending knives to wake him in the night to the sound
- of his own weeping, and of her voice saying
- “There, there. There, there.”
- .
- Terror re-forms as fury, leaps over the loving walls
- she holds around him, to make it all her doing.
- He is both lieb and arbeit,
- her career his needs, the tethers
- that bind her tautly to his side
- as she reels under the same bodily betrayals
- adding to them his repelling rage.
- Dreaming of something else, she is held in place
- by knowing he would tumble into the darkness
- if the tethers went slack in his shuddering hands,
- if the brackets she must hold firmly around him fell away.
