Posted 11/25
Of Vessels
In the vase, the tuberose.
Its prized fragrance.
Vessel of bed for my healing body.
Vessels of blood. Vessel of plane in atmosphere vessel sky out window.
Dog vessel chewing my foot vessel.
Slipper. A boat in its slip. My mother in hers.
Ella, vessel of silly, sitting on my bed calculating the price of food for rabbits.
Rabbits as vessel for rabbit food.
Envelope vessel for letter vessel in which words vessel of my brain vessel mind vessel soul.
When it warms, I will sit body vessel on the stoop and watch passenger vessels make passage down Brooklyn street.
Vessel of veils; vinegar; vim.
What’s the joke about the truckful of tiny violins crashing into the sea?
Three: one to make music; one to cry into a thimble; one to choke on the salt.
I love you.
Snow cloud vessels snow form snowflakes vessel dust ice vessel no two vessel alike paper taped to refrigerator vessel somewhere west of here vessel.
First, you lose teeth from mouth vessel, and if your mother vessel is sentimental and alive she might place the teeth in a pretty vessel for you to find when you are grown, for you to hold. What, in that bare room on a grey morning, will you do with a handful of your own baby teeth, and, considering the task before you, what will you see when you look out the window?
Ship, vein, wood, clay, gold, silver, glass, ivory, marble, flesh in which to store food, blood, oil, spice, precious ointment, bone.
Sure, it’s something to have a body: intact elbows, armpits, asshole, clavicle, legs. An unbruised sternum. A face.
It is 2020. I have no wisdom teeth, no breasts, only one kidney. My hand, I gave in marriage. I am either of half a mind or of three minds.
Across my convalescent room, the tuberose opens.
Each semester, at least one of my students writes of the Ship of Theseus, how its wooden parts rot, how those parts are replaced with other parts, part by part, until, after a century or so, the vessel in the harbor is no longer the vessel in the harbor.
It’s a thought experiment, my student says.
Is it? I ask.
But what of Mama Heaton’s patched housedress? Grandpa Joe’s axe, both head and handle restored, still swinging at the mulberry tree? What of my own body? What of thought? Of experiment?
I am so tired. Vessel of skull on silk pillow vessel of pillow. In the end, what will contain me?
Dream vessel of stem of that fragrance of the snow that fell on your birthday the year you turned nine of the bowl that caught it of a ladder in the rain of basin and drain of hold me while I am still here to be held.
“Of Vessels” is a poem from the collection Everything is Temporary by Artist-in-Residence, Nicole Callihan.
On September 29, 2020, Nicole Callihan was diagnosed with breast cancer. A double mastectomy, a lymph node dissection, radiation, and hormone therapy followed. All the while, she committed to her everyday practice of making art. Many of the recordings were originally posted to the weekly open-mic series, Wednesday Night Poetry; the images that accompany the poems were selected from her Instagram collection @thebluepitcher. These are poems and notes she took in the months that followed her diagnosis.
See Nicole Callihan read her work here:
