After moving to Texas
during the hottest,
driest part of summer

I made a deal with myself to suspend
despair for at least five years.
Suspend, as if from a bridge
hung at the height of a cliff, a narrow
bridge across which
I walk, holding
my breath
and my whole life
in all ten fists.
Suspend, as one might hang a great weight
from the end of a long rope.
And let’s assume the rope is weatherproof
and strong enough to hold the weight
of despair. Let’s assume I could stand
for at least five years, that my fists
would not give out their grip.
Despair, as in even the dandelions
refuse to bloom here, as in being the void
of hope, the place where it goes
when it has lost itself.
Despair, like that of one leaf
pulling in all the light it can
but no matter what it does
it grows on the stem
of the prickly lettuce
in this backyard,
and summer is bringing us all
from wilt to crisp and crack.
The yard is broken, is malfunctioning, has grown
a black thumb. The yard has cracks wide enough
to hold hands with, to stuff with sticks.
What I mean is, the yard is like a person
in despair. Like the woman suspended
on that bridge, tossing buckets
of water and seeds into the abyss
as if she could fill it or heal it. I was on my knees
in the yard building a raised garden
out of emptied moving boxes.
I was racing a storm I didn’t believe
was coming when my son fell, when
my son was suspended and pulled
down by gravity and entropy,
when he slipped on a warp
in the floor of our new rental.
When my husband came outside to say
would you come look because he’s not getting up.
And we wrapped him in a gray moving blanket
with labels still stuck to it. We carried him
to the car, suspended between us.
We became the two cliffs, and he, the bridge
suspended between us, a bridge with a broken
leg. Broken like clouds
cracked by lightning, like the garage door
that won’t close and we don’t know
this neighborhood well enough yet
to know if that’s okay. But we know rain
when we smell it, when its fat splats slap us
like it means to break us. We know a storm
when we lay our son
in the back seat of our car without knowing
how to get from where we are now
to where we need to be.