Hans Christian Andersen
Feared Being Buried Alive
I, too, Hans Christian,
once left a warning note. Your bedside
table’s scribble read, I only appear
to be dead—an effort to ward off
the would-be pallbearers
who ’d drop you
into your grassy plot in Nørrebro,
forgetting to check your nostrils
with a hand mirror for a fog
of breath. You dreaded
startling awake, six feet of Denmark
on your chest. At seventeen,
I stuck my own note
to the base of a blue
ceramic toothbrush holder:
Don’t forget to brush
in small, soft circles. As a child,
I ’d chipped my right front tooth
and incisor on a pool’s
concrete edge and had grown
phobic about further
eroding my smile. I worried
that if I came home at midnight
still tripping from a five-strip
of blotter acid, I might brush
maniacally and scrape
off chunks of gum,
my loosened teeth dropping
to the porcelain sink bowl,
like bloody dominoes. I might
wake up the next day
with a corpse-face. It’s important,
Hans Christian, to have a system,
a reminder: a few words written
to catch the eye and hold
back the hand that would bury us.
My Dulcimer Teacher Joellen
Works as a Psychotherapist
which means a creek constantly talks
from a table in the waiting room Joellen shares
with another therapist. The waters slosh
and eddy from one of those white noise
machines with settings like Ocean,
Thunder, Rain, Summer Night, and Brook.
The two shrinks always flood
their office suite above a Persian café
in Westwood with Brook. They submerge
and whitewater patients’ voices
for privacy, so nosy, amateur
Appalachian dulcimer players won’t spy
on the confessions. I confess: A river
once spoke over me. This was back
in Virginia, in the tannic
shallows of a brown river named
for an English king—James. That mix
of coal ash and factory runoff always made
wading into a dare. This is where,
summer nights, my best friend Alicia and I
sat up to our hips in the current
as we clutched our beer bottles
and sliced limes, repeated the same
toast in honor of the polluted river:
Don’t get it in your holes! I only remember
the joke now in overdub. The rapids’
loud static hides my old
self from myself. What were we
talking about, anyway, at dusk, in Richmond,
at twenty-three? Was it the story
in which I leap from a pin oak’s rope-swing
into deep water, scrape my big toe
on the plywood jumping-platform, suffer
the nickname Swamp Foot
for the rest of the year? Here, in L.A.,
our creek beds lie parched, mute,
yet in the waiting room the brook
keeps up its ciphering. I haven’t told
Joellen I’ve secretly dragged
that water for a body. I never know
if there’s an actual patient sitting
behind the second door, waist-deep
in her own story, about to open
her mouth to speak even
as the river rushes in to fill it.
