Larry was the name of the man that my mother
married next, somewhere between ECT treatments
and her daily regimen of pills -- tall, gaunt and ruddy-faced,
or seashells, glowing translucent and red when
pierced by sunlight, tiny veins like a hundred cracks.
He mistook the marriage, I expect, for one
of love, but my mother needed him for
the much more practical task of disciplining my unruly
brother and me, which he did, following her
instructions like any low-level officer.
He was the first to fold me over a kitchen chair
and strike me, hard, then harder, and then hard enough
to dislodge me from the body, until there I was,
amazingly, watching somehow from above,
as though my own protector, keeper of a hidden
passageway deep within myself, previously unknown.
I didn't think that he was a bad man,
merely someone following orders, obedient
to a fault, perplexed, I imagined, as I was, watching,
as though this were but a poorly acted play.
Though I was, secretly, proud to have not cried,
proud to have left the body, without anyone so much
as noticing; and when I came back, having passed
their test, apologizing for my meager sins,
I didn't come back all the way. Not for them,
and not for a long time to come.
