Cummings Improv (3rd draft) Hamster and Wood

Hamster and Wood

Sagging flowers blob on trees and spew

gold film on my windows.
Yes, it's that time again.

Time to pick my way through packed
boxes and dusty sacks from winter,
shuffling on hands and knees

across the creaking attic beams
where I find our old hamster cage.

How many times did we spend

our honeymoon years pressed cheek to cheek

 to peer through its metallic slats?
Sworn to our devotion for our false child

we spent hours watching our hamster 

throw his head into the wood,
sweeping musty scraps of pine upward,

pricking claws through cedar slices,

searching for, what I joked, was the Great Beyond.
 

Our voyeur-days spent cuddling and scoping
the bulging bead of his hamster eye, gemming
like the spotlight of a boutique window, seeing

dirt, seeing dust and opportunity.

He’d find jagged scraps of hope down there.

A plastic glare against his eye.

So that right before the dive

his eyelid curtained down to wrap
whatever present sight had given him.

Reminds me of sex.

How, so much like a hamster, you
dipped yourself until your skin
burned and chafed like a swollen arial.
Holed up--seeking the familiar,
hoping to hide angsty bruises.
(How daddy left you. How mommy
hates you.) How I am the closest

you'll ever be to pure abandonment--
of sense, of fear, of self.

Acknowledge "union"
for what it really is.
Giving up you in me
and piecing together like
hamster and wood.

Slipping with rodent quickness, slamming
inside fragmented trees,
hoping arms will reach out and stroke
the shudder of your hamster soul to calming.

Sometimes, tired of watching our pet burrow
I used to reach into the cage, scoop him out,

and hold him. 

Press the anxious wiggle of his nose to mine,

until with silent relief,

I'd watch my presence limp him against my thumb.

For me, his ceaseless digging
meant restlessness. Unease.

I wish I realized then that stopping him
(stopping you) meant finally having to face 

the need to find

some grass beyond these wood chips.