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Lay the book beside the meter; flatten its buckled pages with your father’s pipe wrench.
Wet your thumb. The ink is safe to swallow in the quantities permitted.
Read into the sink, past the rice caught in the strainer, past the drain’s small beard of hair,
until the pipes take up the syllables your mouth cannot manage.
Enter the date. Enter the reading.
Keep it coming.
By the elbow buried under asphalt, by the washer softening in the dark, by the ditch where rain exposes an inch of yellow pipe,
by the bus kneeling for a woman whose groceries cut two white trenches through her fingers,
by the refrigerated vial, the elevator bearing a bed, the toilet swallowing what the fever leaves,
admit the pressure.
Give it the sealed rooms, the tunnels with their ladders furred in salt, the switch that fits a child’s forefinger.
Give it the little green light we check before going to sleep.
Keep it coming.
We slept so well the first winter. The radiators knocked and settled; we stopped carrying the baby into the kitchen for warmth.
The laundry dried. My father’s ulcer closed. Somebody planted mint in a cracked traffic cone outside the clinic.
I signed the easement on my lunch break, mustard on my cuff, a pen chained to the counter.
For twelve blocks the brown water cleared.
Put that in the book.
Put in the woman rinsing her husband’s shit from a sheet, singing because the hot water lasts.
My father could find a bad joint with his eyes shut, two fingers feeling along the threads; he taught me before I could spell my name.
Now he asks to rest his hand against the radiator.
The shaking passes for machinery.
Cthulhu, I have seen your name squeezed into the box marked OTHER on the application,
have felt the counter clerk rub it through the paper with a thumb gone shiny from handling our addresses.
You were easy to miss beneath the staple.
You accepted monthly payments; you accepted the spelling we could pronounce; you left the wrench where a hand would expect it.
At three a.m. I knelt to tighten my father’s oxygen hose, my knees in the piss he was too ashamed to mention,
and kissed the coupling when his chest rose.
Keep it coming.
I said it with my face still wet against the brass.
Read the next page while standing. There is no chair in this room.
For every mouth supplied, enter another mouth; for every room warmed, enter the rooms through which the warmth must pass.
Down in the pump house the night men eat with the vibration in their teeth.
One dreams of a shoreline folded small enough to fit behind his tongue; one wakes tasting solder; one stops dreaming.
Their wives turn down the bed. Their children copy the new map from the classroom wall.
The sea has been left uncolored.
Every pipe continues through it.
What takes the weight when we are sleeping?
The boil on the welder’s neck, the woman counting tablets into cups, my father rehearsing his cough before he presses the call button.
What takes the weight when they are sleeping?
Leave that field blank.
The blank has been paid for.
The blank warms beneath the hand laid over it.
I found the shutoff after midnight, behind the shelves of winter peaches, the jars trembling softly against one another.
The handle was ordinary, red, its paint chipped where another wrench had slipped.
I set my jaw. I fitted the teeth.
Above me someone flushed; the feed pipe jumped against my wrist, and a baby started crying through the ceiling,
and the coughing in my father’s room stopped long enough for him to ask if I was there.
Here. I’m here.
Keep it coming.
The handle sweated in my palm until I could no longer feel which way I meant to turn.
At breakfast my boy asks for paper. I tear a clean sheet from the back of the book.
He draws our house with the basement showing, draws Granddad upstairs and the hose curled beside his cheek,
draws the bus and the clinic and a man below the street, too small to reach the wheel above his head.
He gives the man a ladder.
He gives the ladder rungs all the way down through the table.
His blue crayon runs off the page.
I hold another sheet against the edge.