– Tuesday

He is reading the days of the week
off a blister pack, checking which foil
is still whole. Tuesday,
still whole. This is offered
as concern – and it might be, though concern
sounds like
inventory. You do not correct
the tally: you did, in fact,
miss Tuesday. You only notice that the fact
of the missed day and the fact of going under
refuse to be the same, however much
he needs them to be. Behind,
a kettle clicks off; he laughs
at something you cannot see, unrelated,
entirely unwilling to be about you.
You had wanted – this is the truer report,
though it costs something to give it – not correction,
and not comfort exactly either, but one
specific unlikely sentence, delivered
now rather than eventually,
that things would be fine. What you get instead
is the foil, still sealed, and the kettle
going again, and his voice already moving on
to ask whether you've eaten.

You had also wanted the cemetery – Wilde's tomb,
sealed behind glass now, after too many people
kept leaving the same red mark, wanting, it turned out,
exactly what you wanted: proof of having moved
someone enough to leave a trace, before they
put a stop to even that. And the shop on rue Cambon,
where a girl half your age unlatches the door
before your hand reaches it, and you buy the bag
you'd already priced from home. The box,
heavier than the bag warrants, you carry
stupidly the whole way along the quay
instead of taking a taxi, as if the weight
were doing the work the bag couldn't.
You kept the receipt without meaning to. Worked out
against a blister pack that runs three weeks
for less than the coffee near the gates of Père Lachaise,
that evening comes out expensive, comes out short,
and you'd already be due another one
before this one had faded.

There is a shorter tally, kept for yourself alone:
the times nothing arrived at all, and you got up
anyway – not from anything you'd call courage,
more from a reluctance to be found, later,
not having got up.

This afternoon going under
seems less like drowning than like finally
making a point – wanting, for once,
to be the reason someone else
has to account for something, though account
is generous; more like answer,
you're not sure to whom.
It doesn't arrive as a plan,
only as a mood with sharp edges,
it will pass, the way weather does,
into your mother mid-episode,
your father's mess, still not cleared,
all of it wasted.
He did not take you to the circuit, either,
not once – a smaller complaint, and you know it.
The qualifying
is on television. You go and watch it.