Morning Instructions for the Doctor’s Wife

BY CECILY PARKS

Accept the windowthat gives you glass, the dawnthat gives you the maple branchwith a single bud, meadowlarkssinging where you can’t see them.Keep your black nightgown on,more night than gown.Wolves in the wallpaper.Read an article about a manwho coughed blood. If you don’t learnwho lives next door to you, youcan leave the curtains openall the time. Only at certain timescan a body be sexual. The doethat meets your gaze in the meadowisn’t sexual. When surgeons splitthe coughing man’s chest with a sawand then his lung with a scalpel,his body wasn’t sexual.At night the moon pullsleaf buds out of the branch with silverinstruments. If you don’t learnhow many bodies the doctorplaces his fingers intoin a single day, yours will alwaysbe the only. Insidethe coughing man’s lung the surgeonsfound a fir tree. The dark interiorof a lung or a leaf bud, imaginedlong enough, becomes a wilderness.Your mind can do thisin the morning when you don’t havea body. Wilderness isn’t paradise.