Hotel Suicide
________________________________________________________

Dear Nobody,

                    We are the hands you left––
three fingers wire-bound and strapped
to a board, photographed. We mute
what the mind could not forget: names,
what he once said––can never be
taken back.

We held the braided arm, poured
carbolic acid, braced the embroidered arm, a shredding
hotel chair, watched the ceiling arms
                                            stare back like cracked lilies.
We once held a key made of hair, of needle turned twice
in the velour light of a hallway sprouting rooms,
                                                                     once knew
door lacquer, the places skin digs in,
                    how to rip a suitcase full of paper.

What you gave us:
                           tight grip of pen
                           your mouth, a perch on the dip
                           of throat.
What you wrote: unspeakable. The collection of used things,
other people's wedding rings, bird-women
with the claws of beasts––to be arms chained
to the headboard, to be arms above the earth,
to have a decent burial, leaving
                                    the prescriptive purse of money.
We are the hands you read: headline pairing
Life, the mount of Moon, Venus girdle, the second
phalanx of Saturn's finger long with insanity,
the necessary condition for the act, according
to chirognomy journals.
                           In the morgue ten days––
transpierced, evaporated woman, not a trace, not a tooth
punctuating strewn carpets––newspapers printed
our palms instead: striated shells, bleached wood,
tiny whorls drawn up and down the shrinking tips, each
a hooded head in the flash, shadow, flash––as if
a mother or lover could claim imprinted, indelible flesh,
the routes you burned, shipwrecked––
                                        all the evidence we knew.