A lemon clip-on earring knocks
against the fat and perfumed cheek
of the Jamaican orderly
leaning in to change the soiled sheets.

She draws your chest up close,
as she does each morning, firm
against her own, then folds
her arms around your back
to free the tucked-in corners.

Her plastic earring bores
into your dream, becomes another
carpenter bee jawing through
the soft wood of memory.

By chance she is singing the song
that you would croon for me
those mornings I‘d have given anything
to slip beneath the blankets
and writhe all day against the sun
like the still-blind pupa
exposed in a dry-rotted plank.

She is working and singing
the song I grew first to love,
then dread, because it meant light,
because it meant the unfinished
dream of you had ended,

and left us in this world of swing
shifts, paper cups and yellow pills
ground like pumice into apple sauce
by Jamaican or Haitian mothers
and daughters who too have left
their families, who care for ours,

who work all day and again at night,
who sing the oldies that cough and drone
through transistor radios in rooms
made only of curtain and absolute white.
She is working now, and singing
our song, and somewhere out of a deep
remembering, you fell in tune
with the chorus, sat up and sang along:

wake-up little Susie, wake-up,

like nothing at all had changed, like you
were a child, torn from his own delirium,
from his just-broken fever, sitting there,
so breathless, so ravenous between us.