That Woman

(A Sestina)

The bed, visible through the legs of adults and a child circled
round, looks crisp and taut, as if there is no woman
beneath its sheets sending to a stanchion monitor signals
that measure life. Breathing? Check. BP? Eh. Heartbeat? Slow.
Sitting across the room, on vigil at another bed, I can see
only the child’s silky brown curls, forehead, eyelids, 
 
and hand, stretching to touch the woman’s fingers, eyelids,
and lips. White-coated man with wrinkled seat addresses the circled
bereft. “We’ve put her under, as you can see,
into a medically induced coma. The head trauma for this woman
was severe. She needs rest to reverse or at least slow
the swelling.” The child’s hand caresses an earlobe. She signals

to a standing woman a question, and that one, leaning down, signals
back that all will be well. But I can see that one’s eyelids
and the left one is twitching. Like that group, I am slow,
dulled from this waiting-forever, my numb arms circled
round my purse, bulky with nothing helpful. I am a woman
in grief, too. Preemptive, like these people. Sad, you see,

and beneath that, angry. Soon, but not that I yet see,
bubbles of rage will surface—pop! Surface—pop!—signals
of the eruption, the fiery, spitting spew of this—and that—woman
from whom all meaning has been ripped. Whose eyelids
cannot wash clear these gritty truths, and whose eyes are circled
by dark confessions of despair. You see, I have been slow

to piece together that dearly beloved woman with mine. Slow
to understand that the veering car she did not see
was my wife’s, whose drinking we fought over and circled
around like a stupid hound’s chased tail. I look for signals
that they know who we are, but I see only tear-swollen eyelids.
The child. My failure when she becomes a motherless woman?

Failure to reign in my wife—herself a motherless woman— 
raped by a drunken father who, quick to exploit, was slow
to gauge the lava raging beneath her skin, under her eyelids.
A man nurturing, finally. Albeit the hemlocks and pines you see
out beyond our creek. My failure to catch the signals
that she was not saved by revenge? That despair circled,

eddied like sewage draining her vitality, like the circle round that woman,
whose child is unclear, whose life signals are dim, beeping, slow,
and whom I see through useless, dry-as-dust eyelids.