Caroline Plasket

My Neighbor Totaled My Van and We Were

Still, in the waiting room
while the body shop estimated
damage. I rummaged through

conversation with the other person
in the room who told me
about his time in Iraq and what it was like

in Hussein's palace how they took it
over, how these are things he can't
communicate to his children.

My lover and I have been
reading a couple's therapy book
each night, based on an emotional

technique for reaching, where I picture
him, shirtless, over my body
digging, moving me, burrowing

miles deep until I am uncovered,
a pile that won't fit back in-
to the hole the same way it came out.

No, it must be more like the trees
and the language the roots share.
Did you know they can speak

(through bacteria) for miles? They can
say blight, rot, infested, sharp…
When your tongue lightly brushes my lips

I hear you say that you give
yourself to me wholly, but a little
at a time. I think it is more

like the movie where the man lost his wife,
but couldn't live with himself
for not knowing it the moment she died.

He didn't hear her tentacle language
span miles to utter sharp. Something
is to be said for the chaos

that surrounded the tower of Babel.
We embody all our words fallen out
that will never fit back. As if

the mouth were an open
sore and words infections,
and what if all of the best phrases

have been used
up by everyone else, and we
must create our own language.

We begin in soft vowels and hard
grunts which we tame into an understanding;
a translation of feeling. It must have an epicenter

of want—any inventor only works to make lust
tangible. Sentience is sound moving
in hollow spaces…is the sound you hear

when you snap the tablecloth
straight before throwing it over the table.
In the waiting

room I am listening to my neighbor
apologize softly, and I learn things
of him beyond what I see him loading

in and out of his truck; the groceries and golf clubs.
In the Vietnam War he was overseas
and he didn't know any of it

when he got there, but he learned
how to read the signals, he learned
how to pulse the buttons. The machines

were strangers he became familiar with,
their insides, the wires, how they were broken,
how to touch them into fixed. How to stay

up all night if there were a raid
and tap, tap, tap an echo of warning
into the souls at the other side. And he kept

saying he was sorry he wrecked my car, he let
my children weed his garden and he overpaid them
and when someone means something you know it.

We have all heard stories of the crows
who bring shiny things to those they adore. We have
all seen the way our dogs greet us. Once my lover

and I fought like the edge of a blunt knife
and the next morning he was waiting
at the couch, crying, and he bought a book

for us to read and each night he smooths
our edges with stony words he reads to me
and somehow recommits himself, chronically,

and I tell you one day we could cut
through anything—through any babel,
and I am learning how to know it

when people say what they mean to. I am
learning how to know it when the whetstone
is ready, without looking to see if the bubbles

have disappeared. I draw
stick figure "us" I put
smiles on the faces like

a religion. If I tell you I am the kind
of person who rinses
their rice before they cook it do you

know what I am telling you?

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Caroline Plasket's work has been published or is forthcoming in The Night Heron Barks, Pleiades, Copper Nickel, The Laurel Review, Cherry Tree, The Cortland Review, Threadcount Magazine and elsewhere. She was a fall 2016 mentee in the AWP Writer to Writer Program.