UNEASE

I get some of my best ideas in the tub. I never go in there without a notebook. And a cup with a bristle of pencils. And a sharpener. One thing I’ve found myself thinking recently is What if the tub smashes through the floor? This is an old house and there are a lot of problems with the things I can see. What about the stuff I can’t see? I can see straight down to the basement from the dining-room for god’s sake. How do I know all that water's going where it's supposed to go? I like to fill the tub up. I like to stay in there a long time. I like to top up. That's a lot of water. How do I know it’s contained? How do I know it’s not pooling in the ceiling, softening stuff? And if the crash comes will it happen all at once in a great WHOOSH or will there be a kind of one-two-three staging where I have an intuition—brace—suspended momentarily in the agony of impending before we smash—tub, ton of water, me—through the ceiling splat onto the floor below where I become a blot aghast at the great empty Rorschach overhead emitting desultorily descending rotten floorboards, hunks of plaster, like the middle distance on a snowy night? But honestly it’s moot. This poem testifies how far past intuition I've come. I’m all ears, my skin a total organ, neck a good old S bend cranked against the rim, elbow and knee pipes just like well elbows and knees, my entire conglomeration of tubing taut—braced for mayhem. I can already see myself cracked like an egg on the floor below, bath tub on top of me, a tide ripping across the boards a smidgin faster than it can rain through. I won’t want anyone to find me like that, naked, broken, sodden. I’m not crawling away from this; I’m done. I’ll have to give up the ghost without a damn thing to cover me. Pinned on the floor, helpless, hearing the whirling sirens focus in. Another possibility is the cabinets in the kitchen—all those monstrous plates—crashing down, tearing lumps of plaster in their wake. Or spiders in the teapot spout—a different theme.