IF IT HAPPENS TO YOU Poem by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

How do you go to bed when you have just run over a sheep? Trembling on the
edge of the bed your cold hands like raw steaks over your eyes, her hand

forms half an orange which presses heavily upon your knee, back and forth
it moves, squeezing out everything that has happened to you but don't forget the speed

of speaking, without pause everything remains a void, sadness has little chance
of coming through. Please speak of wine you think, of how the children

are growing and of all the poppies recklessly springing open but her head has
long been an Autocue, you know what you must say to comfort her:

playing fair weather has more to do with rain and it's raining as though we once
invented the sun. You walk circles round the bedroom, trying to click your thoughts

together like a bracelet, wash your hands again and again and examine them
testing their purity, body hissing like a rusty barbeque.

She says there are glasses and a bottle of wine in the nightstand, left from the last time
that you trembled and all that blood. After two glasses she gives up, you shrink beneath the sheets

like the sheep beneath the tires, you think of everything that has ever perished and the slap
that it brought with it, you carry this with you until your heart becomes a grave, your head

the granite stone above it, finally at rest you weep wine until it is
no longer about the sheep but about who will comfort the driver, you poor, daft dog.