Hamster and Wood, edit 5. No... 6.

Hamster and Wood

Spring they say. Season of Love
they say. A time for rebirth.
But all I see are tulips bob
and spew gold dust on windows.

Yep, it's that time again.

Spring cleaning time. Going to pick my way
through sagging boxes and empty popcorn tins
tucked in lonely attic corners between a tilted lamp stand
and the Nativity Jesus.
Time to coat my palms in gray film
until I stumble on our old hamster cage.

I remember you.

How we passed our honeymoon years
cheek-to-cheek peering through the dome-wire
slats. How we bought that hamster, called him
our foster child. Hoped his noise would fill
our hushed-up home-void. Countless hours
spent watching him throw his hamster head
into the wood chips. Sweep up
musty scraps of pine. Prick claws
through reddened cedar slices.
Looking for what? you asked.
The Great Beyond. I said.

But he was not the only one searching
for greatness. You, too,
dipped yourself in our marriage bed
until your skin swelled--a ripe seed
ready to burst.
Holed up in me, you sought a future
you never got. One that looked like toy cars,
T-ball games in the backyard. A beyond
that sounds like lips coaxing
the soft yawn in son. In me
you hid your silly things:
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.

Because isn't that what union really is?
Coming together to give up you in
me. To piece together. Like hamster and wood.
Woman and man.
To make one. A tiny-fingered one
that dwells so deep inside you,
you can't stop digging to find him.
You racked your mind to such a frenzy that most nights
you begged for me to hold you. Wrap my arms
like fragmented trees stroking the shudder
of your hamster soul to calming

while our own false child in his wire cage
kept me up so many fruitless nights that sometimes
I would scoop him up too, hold his twitching
body in my palm and watch my silent presence
limp him. Was I too short-sighted? You knew
that while I thought I was cooling his unease,
that stopping him (like stopping you) meant new
beginnings. A start to things
like empty beds, lonesome attics,
and your overwhelming need.
And it was that need that would one day
leave our cages empty. Your urge
that would take you out to find
no longer my arms, but the fertile
grass not in my barren wood chips.