Journal without dates:
from Paris to Honfleur to Caen

Mannequins chatter on the lovely streets.
The Seine droops waterless, swirling rotten hair.
The Eiffel railway runs a foreign-cattle boxcar
one quarter of the way to heaven.
Hear the tourists bellow delight.
In the Louvre, the delicate Japanese stare
and stare, appalled by Rubens' lolling women.
Outside, in the courtyards, pigeons swoop ominous
as ravens, and dirtier.
The monuments stink of cat piss.
On the streets, we see the frenetic copulation
of the moment on history's soiled bed.

I leave with my hands, catch a ride
from Versailles with the dream of tall trees in my mind.
The first night I sleep in a field and wake up
just before my skin turns to mud and wet leaves.
Grass grows with my eyelashes.
I find mushrooms in my hair.

The next day I walk forever through fields.
My feet cry like pink kittens.
Within ten hours I drop deep
into the loneliness of freedom.
I talk to the grass, the little rocks,
the distant figures of women bending in gardens.
I sleep in the tight shell of my body
anywhere, without dreams, losing memory on the grass
like a snake who writhes away her dead skin.

My lies become historical.
I walk through strawberry fields inventing
elaborate tales of orphanages, seductions, deaths.
The land's memory rises up through me,
turning my brain's black soil.
Sometimes I remember the wars
and wonder if I am stepping
on a dead man's heart, or his hand,
or the shadow of his shattered eye
shrivelled like a grape.
Who died here? I whisper in twilight's ear.
The sky inks out a crimson scroll.

I walk and walk, barefoot sometimes,
the mellow flesh of mud thrusting through my toes.
After a while, I know I amble
through a painting I've seen at D'Orsay.

When I meet the road a century later,
I throw a black stone over my shoulder.
I put out my thumb.
The price of a ride with a stranger
     is words, a little fat,
     a bit of hair, dry paper:
     anything that can be burned.
Remember the body is blooded wood.

Strangers, I say to myself, climbing in.
You are no one but a stranger.
Forget the exhausting habit of tenderness.
I look at the window and instead of my face,
I see his, the reflection of a knife-edged nose
and white-gold hair.
Smile, smile.
I am Danish, he says, I am
going to Normandy, to the sea.
This is romantic enough.
As soon as I close the car door,
everything begins.

*     *     *     *     *

We leave the living behind.
He drives away from those green valleys.
Lives are folded lovely in lace
in little houses, fingering polished forks.
We drive away from the yellow-blue gardens,
children's voices, simple bees.

But I think to myself: be thankful.
I can already smell the deep openness of ocean,
already feel my skeleton sink through water.
The Dane's eyes grow bluer and bluer:
bits of sky snared in a round bone.

The price of a ride with a stranger
is skin, or words.
The man tries to pry me open like a mollusk,
digs through the soft flesh,
searching for my pearl of hurt.
I tell him nothing.

I pretend to forget where I come from.
How did you learn to speak French? he asks.
Have you ever had a lover who died?
Did something bad happen to you in Paris?

I think for a moment of Camille, and tell him,
     I discovered what a beast Rodin really was.
He laughs, he does not realize I am serious.

In the afternoon, he changes tactics, tells me
the sad story of his life, the bitch his wife was.
I am falling asleep, my cheek a pressed rose petal
on the car window. I don't care, I don't care.
He feeds me cheese I can't afford, though
I will pay for it. That's fair.
I can't even afford the toilets in France.
When night comes, he wants a bed.
It is too cold to sleep outside, he says.
The crops grow up around us
like soldiers, tall and ragged.
The corn is starving.
Every hotel is full.
He wants me to go to a farmhouse
and ask for a room in my pathetic adorable French,
but I know the bed would be ancient and creaky.
No, I think, no, I don't want strangers
to hear this stranger
cracking his whip-length against me.
When we pass through the little towns
the silence is terrifying, deep as the well
where the unwanted baby is thrown.

*     *     *     *     *

Finally we find a little inn, finally.

Two in the morning and I'm so sick of him and his probing intellectual bullshit I could throw up, but he's the one whose paying, isn't he? I haven't taken a shower or slept in a bed for a week: I decide to be stoic and pay my dues without a fuss. He sits on the edge of the double bed smiling with large, very intimidating teeth, horse's teeth. But it's his blue razor eyes that cut me up. A true Aryan. I like Latin men, dark men; at least I know what to expect. This blonde Goliath is suspicious. I can never guess the motives of the pale-eyed. And he is so big! When he is sitting, he is almost my height. When he stands, I stare at his lower rib. He must be six and a half feet tall. I take a towel off the vanity. ‘I'm going to take a shower, okay?’ He smiles; I think he is relieved. I may smell.

In the shower I do not think of him, or what I'll be doing later. Cleanliness is momentary, like laughter. I let the hot water convince me that life is a warm kiss all down my body, all through time. I stay under the hot spray with my eyes closed until I hear a knock at the door. He even turns the knob. My time is up. I turn off the water, dry myself, and come out wrapped in a thin cotton towel which has dried over a thousand bodies.

He is not greedy. He doesn't touch me, doesn't leap on my naked shoulders. Perhaps it won't be so bad after all. He takes a quick shower himself and smiles when he comes out and sees that I am already under the covers. He turns off the light and comes to the bed naked. Even in the dark I can see his penis is too big: I am going to be split in half. I am going to bleed. He gets in beside me and puts his head back on the pillow rather stiffly, as if his erection effects his whole body. I am falling asleep, but every time I open my eyes, I see he is staring straight up at the ceiling.

For the first time, I am afraid he is a murderer: in the morning, the hotel staff will discover a dismembered young woman decorating the room. But no. He is just uncomfortable. He has had no cues from me about how to proceed: other women are more encouraging. I don't want to be fucked by him and he knows it, but he also knows that I owe him something. How tiresome. My mind is turning into a soup of dreams: I am talking to him but nothing comes out of my mouth. I see a forest, I am walking towards a forest… Then his hand wakes me up. His hand is on my belly, my hip, moving downward, then hesitating–these things have a proper order. Before he touches my genitals, he must touch my breasts. I smile with my eyes closed and he mistakes my smile for the signal he has been seeking. His touches are the fumblings of a rough and awkward boy. Nothing in me moves. I begin to fall asleep again, enter the trees, the tangle of words and voices from another country…

His mouth is on me, my shoulder, breast, suckle, suckle. I wake up again and kiss him with all the passion I can muster, thinking if I don't do something, this groping will go on all night and I'll never get any sleep. I imagine women while I kiss him, the few women, the very beautiful one especially, the one starved for touch. He almost feels like her, if I use my imagination. But he is not so gentle. Suddenly he is on top of me and spreading my legs with his knees. There are two major technical difficulties here: the dryness of my vagina and the size of his penis. It is a cucumber. It is enormous. It takes a long time to convince my sleepy vagina to admit this great vegetable, but after one particularly hard thrust, he manages to bury himself inside me. I cry out because my cervix has been taken by surprise. ‘Not too hard,’ I whisper. This is the first thing I have said since I said I was going to take a shower. He thrusts harder. He is an albino bull. I dig my heels into the bed, pushing myself away from him. Harder. His back is a sweating white boulder. Harder. He is whispering what I suppose are Danish obscenities. Harder and harder. I pray that this will not damage me in any way. It hurts now; it really hurts, and I am pressed up against the headboard. I can't get any farther away from him than I already am. He yanks me down the bed again. ‘You're hurting me. You're hurting me! Stop it! Dejame, cabron!’ But he doesn't let up.

I am crying when he finally comes. ‘You stupid pig!’ I push him off me like a great bloodless side of beef. ‘Who taught you to fuck, a mad dog? No wonder your wife left you, you asshole!’ I am out of the bed now, I've clicked on a light. My voice is rising. I am becoming Canadian again, possibly even American, because I am so loud. ‘You're a fucking rapist!’ Blood runs down my leg and I wipe it away on the back of my hand. He sees it and looks down at the crimson smears on his own slimy member. Suddenly he is apologetic, though he continues to say, ‘Shhh, shhhh.’ I throw a shoe at the headboard, narrowly missing his face. ‘You pig!’ I slam the bathroom door and twist the water on again. I climb into the hot pelting air, swearing under my breath, crying, furious.

I am not bleeding because he has broken anything, though it feels like he has. I'm menstruating. Perfect timing. I won't tell him that though: he should be left with the guilt of causing injury. Jerk. He has caused injury; I stand bow-legged, the way I imagined I would when I was still a virgin. The water whisks the blood and red threads of tissue and sperm away from me. Stupid asshole, I whisper to myself, fingering the raw edges of my vagina, the little tears of skin. Yes, I know, I was asking for something, but I wasn't asking for this. I wince as I dry myself between the legs. I will leave the bastard in the morning, after he buys me breakfast.

*     *     *     *    *

The sea is a dream we crash through
and rise from
shrouded in salt,
the seams of our skin
cracking with dryness.
The sea is a dream if you were born
on the plain, a human pebble tossed
between desert and mountain.
The sea is a dream.

Alone again.
I steal apples, vegetables,
a pair of pants hanging to dry.
A Spanish man buys me beer and cheese,
grateful that I, too, love tortilla de patata.
He talks about Spain as if she is the dead woman
he has adored since his youth.
A marmalade cat leads me
through the streets of Honfleur.
I inhale the dough heaven of bakeries.
The children are beautiful here,
green-eyed flowers dancing without the wind.

In another azure town on the ocean,
I cut my feet on the shells
of the elegant beach.
The sky is a grille
of crushed silver spilling gold.
Dusk rolls her glowing body over.
A naked angel slices open the clouds
and crystal spears pierce the water.
I swim laughing through that light,
sea in my mouth, salt in my nose,
my body naked and slick
a seal romping in my skin.
The water is warm, and holds me.

No matter how quickly I move,
no matter how I try to writhe away,
the water holds me, lifts me,
and never once
do the wide turquoise hands
hurt my wondering skin.

But I was born on the edge of a desert
with the bloodshadow of mountains marking me.
I have known forever
the sea is a dream.

*     *      *     *     *

The museum in Caen
breaks the little stick
I have been using for a heart.
Poke, poke.
Even before entering, I touch headstones
and tufts of hair stuck to bones.
A storm of useless blood rises up in me.

The museum stands on a plain of growing light,
acres of grass where the wise never walk.
My journey ends on the cliffs where my feet
founder in the history of wars.
My journey ends at the glass doors
of a modern museum.

I spiral down the steps, stumble
into the black and white hole of photographs.
As if he had been a lover, I recognize Hitler's voice
on the scratchy recordings without reading the signs.
The angular roar and rough snap of German
beats around my head like a scarlet-skinned bat.

Does anyone adore a Fascist?
My skin weeps.
My eyes pucker like mouths
that do not want to swallow
this abundant poison.

The photographs are blown up,
the size of real lives.
People, lovers of silk and silver
candlesticks, lovers of violins, lovers
of chocolate, of air, lovers of
people stagger mute on the walls,
their flesh uttering cries.

Each photograph is acid
poured on the brain's blue rind.
When I have breathed the relic
of this air for long enough,
the photographs grow tongues and speak.
The gypsies, the Jews, the witnesses
of Jehovah, the unionists, the Catholics,
the people, people, people:
each chiselled bone chafes my eyes.
Such thoughtful slaughter.
The fine viciousness of opposable thumbs.
Only those who mourn the murders
they did not commit
remain human.

Who took the photographs?
Did he later leap, flailing,
out of his mind?
Who? These inky tattoos?

The tourists are not sobbing, though
suffering hangs around them like curtains,
opening, opening, falling in red folds,
the drapery of raven smoke.
Even in their cold sleep on narrow bunks,
women wore the stunned accepting faces
of slaughtered deer.

Eyes scarred with darkness
stare at me from cowled blankets of lice.
Scant flesh, but witness the spark
of spirit in those bone-rimmed sockets.
Eyes that startle a camera forever.

I stand before the body of Masha Ruskina
in Minsk, 1941, yesterday afternoon, half an hour ago.
She is slender, seventeen, a partisan Jewess.
Her neck is tooth-marked and bent, a dog's broken stick.
She hangs by her neck in a pale sweater,
blond hair pulled from her face, mouth slightly open.
Soldiers stare at her shins and dangling feet.
I commit her face to my soul.

Beyond me, before the bonfire of bodies,
a child grows exhausted, bored
with these grand visions of murder.
She shrieks like a hungry fledgling
and twists her black hair.
Her eyes are crow-dark.
She wants that green field above us.
She wants to drink and fly
through the sun-hurled air.