after William Carlos Williams’ “Between Walls”
That spring, I’d drive fast along the back
roads up to the lake and walk barefoot over the wings
of scattered shells. The bodies of the
brittle butterflies crunched under my feet. At the hospital
my mother bent over bedsides where
patients gasped, skin sucked against their ribs. Nothing
helped. Even the ones who survived will
bear the lifelong marks: scars will grow
into smudges on X-rays, cloudy like the glass shards that lie
along the lakeshore. I’d sit on the cinders
stacked beside the Lake Ontario waves in which
all sharp-edged fragments get ground to a soft shine.
I found them in a coat pocket the other day: a broken
half of a shell that sliced against my fingers and the pieces
I gathered, months ago, of a green
bottle.
By Claire Buck