Cotton Flannelette

Shake the bed, the blackened child whimpers, O shake the bed! Through beak lips that never will come unwry. And wearily the iron- framed mattress, with nodding crockery bulbs, jinks on its way. Her brothers and sister take shifts with the terrible glued-together baby when their unsleeping absolute mother reels out to snatch an hour, back to stop the rocking and wring pale blue soap-water over nude bladders and blood-webbed chars. Even their cranky evasive father is awed to stand watches rocking the bed. Lids frogged shut, O please shake the bed, her contour whorls and braille tattoos from where, in her nightdress, she flared out of hearth-drowse to a marrow shriek pedalling full tilt firesleeves in mid air, are grainier with repair than when the doctor, crying Dear God, woman! No one can save that child. Let her go! spared her the treatments of the day. Shake the bed. Like: count phone poles, rhyme, classify realities, bang the head, any iteration that will bring, in the brain’s forks, the melting molecules of relief, and bring them again. O rock the bed! Nibble water with bared teeth, make lymph like arrowroot gruel, as your mother grips you for weeks in the untrained perfect language, till the doctor relents. Salves and wraps you in dressings that will be the fire again, ripping anguish off agony, and will confirm the ploughland ridges in your woman’s skin for the sixty more years your family weaves you on devotion’s loom, rick-racking the bed as you yourself, six years old, instruct them.