Lighter Things

For Claire and other good women who can’t hold their whiskey.

Claire can’t get stoned,
tolerate cigarette smoke,
show up tomorrow in today’s clothes
and last night’s mascara.
She is in sync with the sun—
prefers to let its first yellowish light
wake her, favors the esoteric joy
of things that bloom at dawn
over things that hunt at night.

Claire can’t do whiskey.
Having been politely excused
from the venue, we draped her over
our limbs, made a barrier with our bodies
as if to say This one is from our tribe.

But for days Claire can list
primates evolution has weeded out,
holds tight the old knowledge
of what came before us, recognizes
something can be mined there,
that it takes acres of time
and several million immeasurable units
of pressure for carbon to crystallize.

Claire can hold me
at the time clock, quiet the violent weeping
of a woman whose most urgent desire
has just died in her gut,
show me how to dress my wounds,
how to prepare and dispose of stillborn
ideas. With a deft shift, delicate,
she turns my gaze toward lighter things
and even things that weigh nothing at all.

After arranging it into something recognizable,
into what passes as a human heart,
she withdraws to grieve privately
her own loss, climbs down into it
to find diamonds glowing in that dark.