Your husband drives you to the clinic in Burlington

after he finds you lying next to the hole you dug

to plant daffodils. Looking up at the sky

you see him in a blue world moving without you in it.

As though he's riding a subway car that doesn't stop at

your station.

 

Crystals where they don't belong, says the nurse practitioner,

tipped like too many ice cubes from a beaker when you pour lemonade

on a hot summer afternoon—plop!         ploploplop!—and the world

tips up!        upupupup!         (Or are you tipping down?

You can't tell, or even where you end and the

world begins.)

 

Dr. Epley's maneuver is supposed to help. But first you have to lie down.

And the room spins and you want to throw upupupup!

You'd punch the nurse's nose if it would hold still. Or your fist.

Or the hand to make one. You are being disassembled.

Who knew you needed ears

to see?

 

You are nothing but something your stomach wants to expel.

Where will you be then? And up you want to come! If only

to feel nothing: an empty stadium, a transparent eyeball.

The nurse looks down at the eyeball zig-zagging in your head.

You want to die, but she can't know your longing

for transcendence.

 

You keep yourself down, inside your body. Slowly, you sit up and stare

at a screw on the plastic frame of an outlet on the wall.

It screws your body to the wall. But the world keeps turning.

Later, in the car, you ask your husband to drive slowly, even though

there's nowhere else you'd rather be right now

than home.

 

That night, you sleep sitting up. It makes you snore and your husband leaves

for the guest room. You dream you're kneeling, planting daffodil bulbs,

just as you did that morning. The sun is high above.

The earth is below. You dig into it.

That's where the bulb will go. Where it belongs.

Down there

 

where your shadow lies.

 

Down there.