From the Cables of Genocide
If you had enough bad things
happen to you as a child you may
as well kiss off the rest of your life.
—an anonymous mental health worker
“The writer. It’s a cul-de-sac,” you wrote that
winter of our nation’s discontent. That first time
I found you, blue marble lying still in the trench, you, staked
in waiting for something, anything but the cell of your small
apartment with the fixtures never scrubbed, the seven great
named cats you gassed in the move. I couldn’t keep them.
You explained so I understood. And what cat never loved
your shell-like ways, the claw of your steady fingers, firme
from the rasping of banjos and steady as it goes
from the nose to the hair to the shaking tip. My favorite
tale was of the owl and the pussycat in love in a china cup
cast at sea, or in a flute more brittle, more lifelike
and riddled with flair, the exquisite polish of its gaudy
glaze now puzzled with heat cracks, now foamed
opalescent as the single espresso dish you bought from
Goodwill. What ever becomes of the heart our common
child fashioned, red silk and golden satin, the gay glitter
fallen from moves, our names with Love written in black
felt pen? Who gets what? Who knows what becomes of the
rose you carried home from Spanish Harlem that morning
I sat waiting for the surgeon’s suction. What ever becomes
of waiting and wanting, when the princess isn’t ready and
the queen has missed the boat, again? Do you still write
those old remarks etched on a page of Kandinsky’s ace
letting go? Like: Lorna meets Oliver North and she
kicks his butt. The dates are immaterial to me as
salvation or a freer light bending through stallions
in an air gone heavy with underground tunnels. Do you
read me? Is there some library where you’ll find me, smashed
on the page of some paper? Let it go is my morning mantra
gone blind with the saved backing of a clock, now dark
as an empty womb when I wake, now listening for your tick
or the sound of white walls on a sticky street. Engines out
the window remind me of breathing apparatus at the breaking
of new worlds, the crash and perpetual maligning of the sand
bar where sea lions sawed up logs for a winter cabin. I dream
wood smoke in the morning. I dream the rank and file of used
up chimneys, what that night must have smelled like, her mussed
and toweled positioning, my ambulance of heart through stopped
traffic where you picked the right corner to tell me: They think
someone murdered her. You were there, all right, you were
a statue carved from the stone of your birth. You were patient
as a sparrow under leaf and as calm as the bay those light
evenings when I envisioned you with the fishwife you loved.
And yes, I could have done it then, kissed it off, when the scalpel
of single star brightened and my world blazed, a dying bulb
for the finger of a socket, like our sunsets on the Cape, fallen
fish blood in snow, the hearts and diamonds we found and left
alone on a New England grave. Why was the summer so long
then? Even now a golden season stumps me and I stamp
ants on the brilliant iced drifts. I walk a steady mile
to that place where you left it, that solid gold band
thrown away to a riptide in a gesture the theatrical
love—so well. What was my role? Or did I leave it
undelivered when they handed me the gun of my triggered
smiles and taught me to cock it? Did I play it to the hilt
and bleeding, did I plunge in your lap and wake to find you
lonely in a ribbon of breathing tissue? Does this impudent
muscle die? Does love expire? Do eternal nestings mean much
more than a quill gone out or the spit? I spy the bank
of frothed fog fuming with airbrushed pussies on a pink
horizon. I score my shoes with walking. My skill is losing.
It’s what we do best, us ducks, us lessons on what not
to do.
Thanks for the crack,
you wrote
in my O.E.D. that 30th renewal when the summer snapped
and hissed suddenly like a bullet of coal flung from a fire
place or a dumb swallow who dove into the pit for pay. Kiss
her, and it’s good luck. I palm this lucky trade but the soot
never sells and I never sailed away on a gulf stream that divides
continents from ourselves. But only half of me is cracked, the
other is launched on a wild bob, a buoy, steadfast in storm. I may
sail to Asia or I might waft aimlessly to Spain where my hemp
first dried from the rain. My messages wring from the line,
unanswered, pressed sheets from an old wash or the impression
of a holy thing. But don’t pull no science on this shroud, the
date will only lie. She’ll tell you it’s sacred, even sell you
a piece of the fray. She appears on the cracked ravines of this
country like a ghost on the windshield of an oncoming
train. She refuses to die, but just look at her nation
without a spare penny to change. My wear is a glass made
clean through misuse, the mishandling of my age as revealing
as my erased face, Indian head of my stick birth, my battle
buried under an island of snow I’ve yet to get to. What could I do
with this neighborhood of avenues scattered with empty shells
of mailboxes, their feet caked with cement like pulled up
pilings? Evidently, they haven’t a word
for regret
full heart.
Someday, I said, I can write us both from this mess. But the key
stalls out from under me when I spell your name. I have to fake
the O or go over it again in the dark, a tracing of differences
spilled out on a sheet. If I could stick this back
together, would it stay? It’s no rope, I know, and no good
for holding clear liquid. I gather a froth on my gums, and grin
the way an old woman grimaces in a morning mirror. I was never
a clear thing, never felt the way a daughter feels, never lost
out like you, never drove. My moon waits at the edge
of an eagle’s aerie, almost extinct and the eggs are fragile
from poisoned ignitions. I’m never coming out from my cup
of tea, never working loose the grease in my hair, the monkey
grease from my dancing elbows that jab at your shoulder.
But I write, and wait for the book to sell, for I know
nothing comes of it but the past with its widening teeth,
with its meat breath baited at my neck, persistent as the smell
of a drunk. Don’t tell me. I already know. It’s just the rule of
the game for the jack of all hearts, and for the queen of baguettes;
it’s a cul-de-sac for a joker drawing hearts.
It didn’t matter
that the summer swelled
and lit like paper streaming
from an ember of dying light.
It didn’t matter
that the phrases of a wish
phased out and your face,
lit by coal, was etched
by a waif’s tremulous rivers.
It didn’t matter
when the waves bore holes
in our belonging and the shallows
hollowed out on desire or the sea
with its bedlam of hammers and sirens
fell apart one day as the pelican, beak
sawed in half by suicide, hungers.
What does it matter,
the ash our legacies cover?
This no receipt for buying time?
This loving on lease, paid
through the much-obliged heart?
Does it matter?
This ring in my ears
culling my sleep? This silence
when I move through you
that succumbs me
when I least expect it?
This slaughtering autumn
that overbears and intensifies
the falling out of constellations?
Would it matter if
my memory wouldn’t lie,
wouldn’t treat me with neglect?
Or if my sudden plunge into
an element you despise wouldn’t
quicken me or paralyze
into dry leaving off?
It matters
when the crow calls,
when it flies to the left
of you, when the sea’s
sliced sun follows you
like a boat in pursuit, and
despair of yellowed things
crusts at your insides.
It matters
when the feather of a kiss
at your nape stuns fate
into destiny or sorrow
at the gate gives up—
a simple matter
to matter as you
mean to me.
Today I watched a woman by the water
cry. She looked like my mother: red
stretch pants, blue leisure top,
her hair in a middle-age nest egg.
She wiped her face, her only act
for old tears, slow as leftover piss.
She was there a long, long time,
sitting on the levee, her legs swinging
like a young girl’s over sewer spew.
She slapped her cheeks damp.
I wondered what she watched:
blue herons, collapsing and unfolding
in the tulles, half lips of lapping river
foam, the paper of an egret’s tail?
Does she notice beauty? Does she notice
the absence of swallows, the knife
of their throats calling out dusk?
Does she notice the temporary
denial of fish, the flit of silver
chains flung from a tern, the drop
of their dive? Funny, we use the sound
slice to imitate the movement
of hunger through wind or waves.
A slice of nothing as nothing
is ever separate in the realm of this
element. Only symmetry harbors loss,
only the fusion of difference
can be wrenched apart, divorced
or distanced from its source.
I walked the levee back both sides
after that. The river is a good place
for this silt and salt, this reservoir,
depository bank, for piss
and beauty’s flush.
So tell me about fever dreams,
about the bad checks we scrawl
with our mouths, about destiny
missing last bus to oblivion.
I want to tell lies
to the world and believe it.
Speak easy, speak spoken to,
speak lips opening on a bed of nails.
Hear the creaking of cardboard
in these telling shoes?
The mint of my mind
gaping far out of style?
Hear the milling of angels
on the head of a flea?
My broke blood is sorrel, is a lone
mare, is cashing in her buffalo chips.
As we come to the cul-de-sac
of our heart’s slow division
tell me again about true
love’s bouquet, paint hummingbird
hearts taped to my page.
Sign me over with XXXs
and passion. Seal on the lick
of a phone, my life. And pay.
And pay. And pay.
So what of our sputtering names,
unhinged. So what of blank
seasons, blistered and shot
from the cannons of our slow desires.
And what of summer’s pestilence,
our worried flies on sweat sand?
What of the harbor where we fished
our love seals into mute extinction?
What will become of the kiss
I give you, the spit on my lip,
the lips of my vulva pushing
fins and flash? Twelve bushels
of silt and salt, this year
I rivet on a tide as gray
as winter and it stops
my catch. What about the graves
where the suds first dug apart
the sloughs of our nesting?
See the slit-throat pelicans,
the dumbed whales beached on cape foam?
What of this poet
reading season’s end?
My worm heart, overwrought
as a slacked line, loses.
I keep hoping she’ll die but I think
it’s me with my lumps at the breast, heart
stalled on a dare, growing exclusion at the base
of my vase. Your roses, please, but the note renders
in a foreign calligraphy, some webbing of duck
feet dangling from the noose like a yanked ginseng
man. I keep hoping he’ll die, that man who keeps her
from you, who keeps parting the curvature of the earth
as seasons slug on, forgetting, stalking, colliding
like cars against the calendar of your steady
ruling. Show me a map where the countries
aren’t women. I know all about us exotics
in the hot house of your dreams. I watch
a spiderwoman as she beats up the bitch.
Rita Hayworth, she had it coming!
as I pummel the distance between us
into nothing. And nothing works.
And what don’t work won’t fix.
I pick up the thread, what’s-left of
grandma’s chain-of-hearts, and the clay feet
of the pot it’s stuck in, bonsai to the bone, I break it
at the neck as I look at her, spitting spiders of blood.
Litost is a word with no exact translation ... a feeling that is the synthesis of many others: grief, sympathy, remorse, and an undefinable longing.
Litost is a state of torment caused by a sudden insight into one’s own miserable self.
First comes a feeling of torment, then the desire for revenge.
—Milan Kundera
At the fifth reconciliation
I have my primal scene, I act
the dream: in walks the bitch
pristine as Rita Hayworth’s rival,
luminescent teeth and nails, hair
her wind has never bit, the skinny
stature of her single grace.
How do you stand it?
she drawls, and quakes.
Furniture is first to go,
camp chair to barren ‘fridge,
the desk, the lamp I wrenched
from work. Yes. It’s the little
things we do that mean a lot:
the china cup my mother bought
(parasoled decadence), no good
for lips, unholdable tub shape.
Little bland girls.
It shatters in the kitchen
where I steady paced
my web of midnights, drilled
my path of cauldron recipes
and moored in the shadow
of their receipts. I smile
at her. I answer:
You call this standing?
... not time, but space; memory:
the irrecoverable home.
—Paul Zweig
Its greatest virtue is how it hides its emptiness.
It bears the face of solitude’s continence in gray
facade. The soulful eyes, windowseats at the front,
see you from three sides. They open into darkness
and minute divisions of light at the inner eye, a
patchwork of sky and treeline taken up by the panes
of north at the inside rear. Every opening
is another opening, a Chinese box of a house.
All doors and windows. The rest is geometry.
Nothing really. Nothing more to see
than the third eye at the top with its sill,
a chimney where a poet might imagine ignitions
of fireflies, a white rail of teeth on the shy
smile of a diffident stairwell that splits,
that comes in and lets out like a tide.
It can go either way. It’s a sure bet.
Small, mostly latticework around the bottom
underworld, a secret stature that bolsters
an empty shell built for an island.
House for sale. There for the asking.
Your property for a price.
Cherry plums suck a week’s soak,
overnight they explode into the scenery of before
your touch. The curtains open on the end of our past.
Pink trumpets on the vines bare to the hummingbirds.
Butterflies unclasp from the purse of their couplings, they
light and open on the doubled hands of eucalyptus fronds.
They sip from the pistils for seven generations that bear
them through another tongue as the first year of our
punishing mathematic begins clicking the calendar
forward. They land like seasoned rocks on the
decks of the cliffs. They take another turn
on the spiral of life where the blossoms
blush & pale in a day of dirty dawn
where the ghost of you webs
your limbs through branches
of cherry plum. Rare bird,
extinct color, you stay in
my dreams in x-ray. In
rerun, the bone of you
stripping sweethearts
folds and layers the
shedding petals of
my grief into a
decayed holo-
gram—my
for ever
empty
art.