To make the banana naked, crack

its neck and peel its jacket. To make

the bed naked, throw back the sheet

and the cotton blanket and the down one, too,

along with whatever's been whispered to

them in the damp minutes around midnight.

To make the dog naked, let the mange

rake and ravage, the tiny mites like

humpbacked handmaids, plucking a hair,

dropping it overboard, scraping away the skin. 
To make the moment naked, take a look

right at it: Under your gaze, the wrapping

of what might happen slides down

its shoulder and slumps to the hardwoods,

drowned in a pool of shadow. Nakedness
means now, the very is-ness of being. Time

is nippling toward us and we dare not

glance aside, dare not toss the subject

out the window, flip the page to stop

the topic of how to bear so much to bare. 
Branches in January are naked.
The inside of eggshells is naked. 
Wrong notes on the cheap guitar

when the child is tired and sad are naked.
The bike, bound to the stop sign

by a spiral of steel, shorn of its tires,

stricken by the nightglow: naked. 
The man's face at the graveside

of his child, a nakedness sheer

enough to tear the fabric of everyone

nearby and leave them dangling there,

threadworn and bleeding out memory,

skinned by the minute that is now upon us,

shaved of everything but the we that are in it.
Emily Bedard is our Poet in Residence for November.


Previously: Finale, Once Upon an Accountant, and Inside/Outside.