Broken Railings

Why do I love broken railings,
a couple of steel teeth
knocked out and broken cable like scarecrow hands
pointing to somebody's fall.
I want things whole but I love things broken.
I study the photograph: crumbs of concrete
flaking white, metal rods exposed, all of it
strangely beautiful on a green road in Brazil.
Inside the plywood box the newly-laid egg
lies delicately cracked in the straw.
Somebody went over that railing. He's on a long table.
Then they heft him from a cold metal drawer and lay him
on velvet. There is no gentleness in the room.
The cows are out again. The youngest are always first,
spritely or small enough to avoid the crackling wires.
Then the heavy-hooved mothers, who bellow, eat our roses.
One leans into the fence so hard it decides to splinter.
We herd them back. We have a beer. We wonder
about the moment of our death. The membrane protecting us
useless as shards of bottles on high cement walls
against thieves. The beauty of beach glass, chipped
porcelain, bone fragments when they're dry and clean.
The sun glinting on all our mistakes.
Instead of going back to bed the ex-assistant treasury
secretary stands in his third floor bedroom and imagines
running full tilt at the back fence, sees himself
hurtling at the air and whacking the top rail so hard
it turns to toothpicks. He'd be on the other side.
The rooster crows. Nails a hen. Ten minutes later
the ex-assistant treasury secretary is standing on the lawn
in the wet early light and the hen is grunting an egg
down a tight pink chute. The cows are still in the pasture
sitting in their pools of nose vapor.
The picture is too beautiful.
There are ripples distorting the lake.
In Brazil the red clay dirt tumbles down a hillside
and someone on the early morning milk run sees the crack
in the road that will open large enough by ten
to accommodate a whole bus.
People will be broken and their people broken
for a long time after. Most of them
will never lie on velvet, even when they're cold
cows under the field. It makes no sense
in this world to love things broken.
The ex-assistant treasury secretary hugs this thought
as if it were his own. He puts the gun in his mouth,
cold metal, perfect as an egg. I look up thinking
"Three's way too many. One of these roosters has to go."
When a man handed me a jewelry box he'd made of a violin case
carefully lined with soft velvet compartments
I set the thing on the floor. I saw a baby coffin. It lives under the
spare bed.
It's scary to think of dying in your sleep.
I want to know when I go. When the pager asleep
in the grass comes to life and the crackly voice says
"gunshot" I drop the trowel and pull rubber gloves
over caked dirt. Do I love things broken?
Can these hands make anything whole?
I pull the elastic on the back of the oxygen mask gently
over a patch of wet hair: bone with dry tines
like a wooden fork long buried in the backyard,
half unearthed now in my lap. The lake goes calm.
Every fence in town holds its breath.
Across my sweatshirt big blue letters spell "Heaven" and
I'm hoping the ex-assistant treasury secretary didn't see
or that he possessed a wonderful dark humor.
I'm hoping we'll all get home tonight. I'm hoping
he's somewhere, whole.

From WE LIVE IN BODIES (Alice James Books, 1997)