This is what it was like: the morning
pale all above me, a patch of sky
like a blue poker flung into a floor
of earth, this is what I have to go on.
I am on my knees at first, a Jessica
a prayer—I pray against the rose
caliche, the hardpan rock, a marbling
of new wound in my forehead.
I’ve never spoken aloud yet to anyone
alive, but I know all the words.
On Wednesday morning I slipped down
the shaft like the small mythic creature
I have always known I ought to be.
No one was looking.
I am mutable still, I fold myself.
It is a gift to be this small & aboriginal.
Even without food, I am growing
& I find this frightful that my body
will become too large to live here comfortably.
The earth opens for me
as I always knew it would for a wish.
All day, I am divined
by sunlight & October has gone
damask, ocherous. When I learn a word
sometimes, I am compelled to use it.
Given my disposition, I will always be
circuitous, precocious, an Embellisher.
Like Oskar, I can make a world
change with my voice, can shatter the diamond
tipped bits of the drill, can make the wells’ walls glitter
back at me. My own voice travels sideways
as it zigzags to the titian center
of the earth & curls back up to me
like a seamstress’ needle against her thimble
in the very center of the Taj Mahal.
I am the only one alive.
By dusk, I am running out
of ways to warm myself.
I have warmed my self with my self.
My own limbs curled all about me, fetal.
Sometimes, I am so obvious like that.
I sing & somewhere above, they can hear me
humming along with myself & myself.
A choir of me’s.
By nightfall, only a small albino fracture
will be left of the moon
& I will have lost all light to navigate.
Soon I will be famous.
By midnight, I can hear my own heart thump
against the well, dry for a million miles
till it hits the water corrugated by the beating
as it ripples back to me. It is instantly
recognizable, the way a mother cat knows
her own by scent & self love. It is me.
Before this day, my skin was never marred
& Quaker pink. My forehead has opened now
quite by happenstance, the etching on a wall
of an undiscovered cave, unlucky hieroglyph.
Take, for instance, my right leg
which, by midnight, I have accidentally wedged
in a notorious & irredeemable position.
I hate to be unnatural, especially in personal geometry
& by now, the leg has lodged irrevocably up
against my face, unbound, unfortunate.
There is to be no turning
back & I will sing & think of crying
for the first time so they’ll know
at last I’ve blundered. I lean
into the rock, a willful child, a little bruised
& if I go out I will die dreaming.
I had forgotten the small news of the night
between dreams & waking into the warm
smooth blown air shimmying down the oval
of the well. In the whole history of song
I know very few. So this is what it’s like.
I am fixing on the hemp clothesline
strung across Aunt Jamie Moore’s backyard,
on last week’s laundered sheets, triangled
like sails, splashed with hyacinth & vetch
they stiffen in the wind against a Texan cobalt
sky. It is dawn. All night long
my eyes widened to accommodate the lack
of light, a self-illumined glowfish flat
on its side, I keep my flicker constant, wide awake
while sleeping, both eyes ajar.
Big gangly weepy gamey men, Sweethearts & Insomniacs,
keep prodding me to sing.
And I sing.
And: Move your foot for me, Juicy.
And I wiggle it back for the man.
And: How does a kitten go?
And I go like a kitten goes, on
& on in that throaty liquid lewd bowlegged
voice like kittens make.
Then shut these big ole eyes.
Someday, I will be buried above ground
like Monroe, vaulted
always in the midst of flowers & sentiment.
On the descent, I was magically compact
boneless, as agile as water itself always
on the way toward other water.
The noise of my own form against the loosening
walls as I am born into the dark
rococo teratogenic rooms of the underground.
All the noise of the world
stops here & muffles, muffles me.
This town knows how to drill.
Sometimes my imagination gets to running wild.
Bring me back
alive. It was so simple to come down.
I wake with my own hair wound
into my fist, in sleep I’ve torn my own
self —pretty, milky curls.
A spool of me.
In the matter of my toes, there has been damage done
but when I come back, they’ll pinken up I’m sure.
In America: Hard Work & Prayer.
Resilience is bliss in the body,
the voodoo of immunity,
the will to come back,
Deliverance.
Surrounded by jelly, an accoutrement of eros for ascent
from the well, I am born.
Wide eyed & swaddled in white linens, I emerge
pristine & preserved, like some Egyptian form
accompanied & gifted
with all the Nilotic charms
necessary for the long quicksilver moments
of the Afterlife.
So this is it.
I rub my eyes in newslight as if awakening
from the mere corn yellow husks
of slumber of an ordinary lateday nap.
The heart is left in situ, I am lifted
from the oubliette
divine by water, blinking by air.
I cannot speak a word yet, but I know them all.
I sing, holding a piece of myself in my hand,
it is hair & fear & the church bells muscle
against each other
& the earth opens for me
as I always knew it would for a myth.
Given my character, I will always be mercurial,
a little sentimental, star-shaped & terrestrial
divine by water, healed by air
luminescent, inconceivable, a prayer
a Jessica, I sing.
These we take for granted:
The blue turn of the water at Three.
The bones of the lover alone
Still life in Prussian blue.
The blonde in the fur cap
At the northern seaport in late November.
These given which we have come to regard:
Anima, Animus
I have gone into the fire & lived
There. I told you in a letter
You touch it only once, you watch it
For awhile you enter the flame.
The blue part of the scald, the part
That mars the skin, remembering
It will not forgive, forever.
That’s a pretty thing.
We imagined life without that auburn heat
Of the south, ultra marine by day, direct.
Aniline & dangerous by dusk, midnight
Blue by midnight as we lay together in that blue
Of blues we said the soul, a girl, could travel
Anywhere, could read the hieroglyphs
Could dream the cornflowers out of nothingness
Could weather any temperature or fire
Bombing, could watch the death of any small
Thing we were metaphysical
When we were young like that.
Imagine this: that it is summer
In the Arctic Regions now. That all the ice
Has come down washing the earth clean
Of its hands. Even if I were alive
Then & loose in Dresden as a little girl
Even if I had lived through that winter
& come to the west to watch you
In white as you did your alchemies,
Even then I would want you as some
Thing I could write down, some palpable
Milori blue substance, a metal, a stone.
Thanks for the comics.
I hate The Green Lantern.
I hate Kid Flash.
I put them all in the mess hall trash.
When I come home, I will need all new clothes.
These ones are all ripped up.
LOVE, HOWARD
JUNE 29, 1964
Born in the dark, you come back up,
it’s a red thing, nightclubbing.
Once, in the Cat’s Paw
I fell in love with each man at the bar,
their deeply flanneled arms, their slow bond
with other boys, their back roads,
the women they would never share.
I hate the day coming back
like the horn with its mute inside.
I hate the sheets suspect of tousling
by some other two,
the clothes that seem dampened
by some bygone decade
when you smooth them back on.
Into jazz which makes no children,
into the high wind of the boardwalk,
the aristocracy of a girl’s free afternoons,
into the south of boys traveling,
the stucco motel with two-hour coupling shifts,
into the north of men drinking clear
water, to the cafe in New York
where the horn player is always hungry
sweaty, lit in red & you
backing him up, me
in the diamondback dawn, needing
all new clothes, born
in the early morning heat, back up
from camp, I think
I was lonely for everyone in the world.
Let me be brief then
I will go on worshiping
the perfect mean lines, the light
on them visible only through the neon
signs of life, the parts which glow
all night when peaceful sorts are sleeping,
when the wanderers are still avenging
their insomnia in the dark
false hellebore red of poolhalls,
in the allnight pastel caves of laundromats,
in the wrong decade coffee shop in Ypsilanti
where even the manager can’t lend the key
to the men’s room,
I love
these things too, the self serve
filling station where a pale hand
sneaks out making silver
change, or the one dark palm
in the meat shop on Amsterdam & 110th
behind the curtain handing out
the little envelopes of Heartbeat,
I covet
these things too,
some third world after this one
& the one that goes hereafter,
in that world you will be important,
devoured by the fawns,
inscrutable Christmas rose, toxic
in your leather coat phase for a long time
worshiping the long blonde stains left
after light & after fire.
A girl goes to the mountains every day
Unearthing dawn after dawn, wishing
The sifting bones would rise to the top
Like the separate castes of cream, white,
Whiter, the most white. She will bring home
The pieces of an old world, line them gentle,
Side by side on the woolly Aztec blanket
On her bed. The ashblonde ivory of the tooth,
The one lost rib, the armour of the good hollow
Skull, the long musical speech of the spine
Penultimate to the starstricken glory of the tail,
The tiny symmetry of chambers in the conch shell
Of the inner ear, the dark red gloom of the pelvic
Arc, two withered fingers in their curl.
You, born walking on this earth, accidental
American thing, wound in this rock bed gorge,
Watched wordlessly as the ice washed over
You till the world was frozen & waited
For the girl to find you there, startled, curled
Into the same dream you were dreaming
In your own jade youth. Then she will have you
Now & need to know: What was it like?
You will answer, monumental dreamer.
She will ask again & you will answer.
Someday I won’t feel things anymore.
In the false light of a hotel room
Where the sheets will be old, worn
Into a perpetual softness by strangers,
A grim moon catches in the boughs
Of the old lamp by the bed,
I am your apprentice. I look for the L
In my name in places of light, lucky,
The good ending of tenderly. The psychic
Leaves the past, sand covers Egypt,
Moves constantly to arrive at the streak
Of the yet-to-be. It’s quirky, this grace
Of telling, the low moonlight of an odd
Decade all over the linoleum floor.
He smells light souring
Cream, something wrong.
Near the harbor where the little lights
Will be strung up for the solstice,
When it’s time, I will look there
For your name. You have taught me
To look for lies in relics,
Jewels, flaws. I come home
& someone’s always in the back seat
Of my car, wailing for Ray Charles,
Left handed, one window left lit
In a small town full of dark trailers,
Late winter, last of the 1900’s.
Someone is still awake.
So another one has walkd
into the sea and left something
worn on a black rock,
it’s the legacy of costume left
after stars get dark & die.
I am thinking of you in a nickel city
in Ohio, ready to blow off. Your finger hookd
around the implement that cuts thin glass,
on the C-note key of your alto saxophone,
the curld gesture of Come Here.
About your innocence, I am unsure.
Someday you will kill off
a luminous star.
So another blue ruin
of a figure in a raincoat
slips into the streetscape, coverd
with history, mist, back turnd, a little
deadly. Our brief generation
hasn’t even yet begun descent
early bloomer, I’m coming home.
What the sailors thought on that last night
As they fell in little heaps on the deck
Asleep beneath the scythes
Of the Norwegian stars, adrift
Until six hundred years from now, their ship
Will sail back home, still with its cargo full
Of sheep’s wool, accidents, the semi-precious
Spices of an Asian girl who ran away.
As if you wanted now to tell me after all
This time what Giovanni was about to say
At five o’clock on a Friday afternoon
As he wrote down his last Italian majuscule
In the rushlight of a sun gone
Rancid with indifference & fell
To a summer night when even the moon
Was a sickle of fire & a whole city kicked off
Its covers in the heat, on a night when bad dreams
Were invented & you gave in. Imagine this:
The last friar in the north of France, latching
The door to his room, leaving his shoes by the bed,
Writing it all down so you would know
Exactly what it is to trick oblivion.
What were you thinking as the ripe wheat stood
Uncut in fields, the peasants bundled in the streets,
The Pope preserved between two blazing fires,
When even the boldest wolves retreated to dark,
When night letters were sent
& never arrived, burning to speak?
There had been some small confusion, some
commotion on the upper reaches of this island,
on the West Side where the sun was setting
like the reigns of emperors gone obsolete.
It was a sunset of a certain alchemy
of oranges with the blues of bruises healing.
It was where the river smell was slightly rancid,
slightly salted, slightly breathless & aroused.
There had been some wonderful confoundment
on the Avenue of the Americas, something
blocking buses & pedestrians. It was something
unemployed & elegant, it was a whale come home
for night. In Manhattan what the whales
sound like at night is blue & unpossessable.
This sound is something only they can do.
It is a sound that catches on the canopies
of pre-war highrise buildings designed to keep out
light & Latin music & the seeds of Chinese children
eating kiwis on these handsome summer nights.
It is a sound that tips the gryphons on the tops
of buildings, one that spreads the concrete wings
of gargoyles clutched to rooftops looking out
for seasons. In Manhattan it is not that common
to have whales. Bowing west, the Ming Men
take home their tangerines & porcelains.
Vehicles have learned to pass the thing
on Broadway, headlights bruise its hide.
The animal is spent & cares no longer
if the taxis honk or merchants or late travelers
take pokes at it. The stoplight changes red
to green resounding on the whale’s great
shimmered rind. As an emperor folds
his napkin at the last meal of his dynasty,
luminous & moribund, inside the whale
the sound is one tympanic archaeology.
The bones are perfect as the gospel wind.
At dawn they are beginning
The small fires around my home.
I am afraid of what the world will do.
They huddle at the fires warming
Their hands, pawing the heat.
I long to come that close to flame.
As the sun spills out
This first extinct red light
I watch them from my window, watch
Them worship something warmer,
Much more powerful than I could ever be.
I am waiting for the season to give in.
I do not believe in punishment.
The world will rise by morning red
At the tips of its wings.
What the world will do it will keep
On doing. By day, I will be light again.
I will survive & outsurvive the hours.
I will have done wrong in my sleep.
I will have dreamed of fires warmer
Fires smaller, much more beautiful.
Far more hungry, worshiped, singed.
There is nothing like the mistral lull
of fishermen devoting days to the sea.
That is the kind of love which I require,
the forty years of worship for the weather,
the homage to the captured thing.
A year ago, I was preparing my body.
A scouring, the long oiled baths, the embalming
with fragrances & color, my long love of ritual.
When all else fails, you see me resorting to mythologies
& I become the Hyperborean that I am.
As of yesterday, it was irrevocably fall.
There was to be no turning back,
we were deep into it then. I am attendant
on this time the time between
the north wind & the present tense.
The landlord had tied down the trees, wrapping
their roots in canvas cloths. He put out
offerings, the bucketfuls of sand left
at the top & bottom of each set of stairs.
Even the salt air could not undo the ice.
He was preparing us for storm.
He was preparing for a time
when the lights would burn even by day.
In this small town, by winter
when only the warmblooded were left,
the fishermen could call out
of hypnosis the water-breathing
creatures which were slowing in the middle
of their tracks, their long descent
into a winter’s night.
I am a creature of the real world, even
though you think I seldom choose to live there
properly. I am an air-breathing sort:
always cold at the extremity, never content
with the heat that I have.
A year ago, I was waterproofing myself
in virgin wool for the cold ride out
to watch the whales as they waited
for winter & hesitated, not too far
from land. In a landlocked time
I have never seen their great grey backs bending
the surface of the sea, never seen their cool reluctance
to stray too far from human warmth.
It’s not enough to have my one dream in hand long after I am gone. I’ll be a locust by then, learning in the next life how to fly transparently, how to deposit my old skins on the outside of the screened-in porch in some pastoral set in the last open space in America a hundred years from now. For now, I am transfixed by possessing the things of this world.
The littlest sister phones collect. She’s run away from home, the first child in our family to be slapped in the face. She sleeps her first night in the Victoria House. She’s too young to have a calling yet. Bells toll, the noon whistle passes over the town, over the phone like emergency, a slate cloud. Fishermen feel it on the bay. Lobsters stir in their crates. It is almost spring. She’s seventeen. She says the town is like a stage set being torn down, a play that’s had its run.
Sometimes I think the world’s coming to end. Joel called this morning on his way to Halifax. His mother has a rare deterioration of the eye. She’s losing the middle of everything. I imagine that she sees him as a mane of dark Polynesian hair, no features left. She lived her life in books, he says. Now she reads the white outside aisles of each page. She watches television through a round glass bauble, listens. They pick our softest parts to take away.
The oldest sister phones at the orchid hour of Southern California Time. By the time our father dies, we will learn to guard each other, vigilant. For one November day, we lived together in his glass home, built above our coal, at the crack of the highest hill of Gan Aden, a cove farm. An opulence in Ruff Creek, a miner’s town, a bowl herd of Black Angus silhouettes, invisible by evening. Our mineral rights, curled in a humpbacked trunk in someone else’s wooden attic, were never found. Someday, we will inherit each other. She will have her life in her hands.
A middle sister calls from Washington. She has a secret, governmental. It’s too dark to speak of. The whole family could wind up back in Pittsburgh with an investigator parked in our driveway, surveying us, making his move to come in, to question us, to find out if any of us have ever lied. We have, all of us. It’s too soon to tell.
I don’t want to be around to watch them die. Tonight, one of us sleeps in the Victoria, old angels guard the wooden bed. The air in seatowns never has a chance to dry. Things moult. Everything is old. The mail is damp & old. I don’t want to be around to watch a family dying off. I want to be the first.
Each plague species exists in two phases: solitary & gregarious. Bands of nymphs wander & adult swarms take flight spontaneously on warm days like these when the body temperature is high.
Two thousand square miles of green-veined wings, we cross the Atlantic & some get lost along the way as the cool air of nights at sea catches in our own wind, the wind we make when we possess everything in our paths in order to survive & feed. In a new century, I will be in solitary phase, dis-located from the swarm on a flight from the desert in West Africa to the New World.
There on the outside of the screened-in porch, I will cling, feeling smug but slightly maudlin regarding the publication of my collected work. It is nearly night. The dark beasts are grazing, digesting constantly, switching their tails back & forth in the faint wheeze of the warm air. A northern wind rustles in the meadow grass. Dogs bark because they always do in pastorals, answering each other like the wolves they once were in another life.
Sometimes, my heart beats too fast for its own folds. I am this, genetically. Ann sleeps the deep sleep of the near-redeemed; she has no veil to speak of. Julie sleeps easily with secrets; she wishes on anything, anything. Melissa sleeps near the sea because she thinks that, once, I was saved there, born into the damp air of an old desire to stay alive for anything, at all costs. I hear the weather coming on. I wake all night & listen to my neighbor’s yard fill up with the metallic sound of snow in early spring. A globe of light comes on in their attic & some nights, you could swear that it’s the moon. It’s dark there, that dark. You can be easily deceived.