Tighten the sails of night as far as you can,
for the daylight cannot carry me.
—KADIA MOLODOWSKY,
“White Night”
Under pressure Mick tells me one
of the jokes truckers pass among themselves: Why
do women have legs? I can’t imagine;
the day is too halcyon, beyond the patio too Arizonan
blue, sparrows drunk on figs and the season’s first corn
stacked steaming on the wicker table. . . . I
give up; why do they? As if I weren’t one
of “them.” Nothing surpasses these
kernels, taut-to-bursting sweet,
tiny rows translucent as baby teeth.
Remember, you asked for it:
to keep them from tracking slime over the floor.
Demeter, here’s another one for your basket
of mysteries.
Irene says it’s the altitude
that makes my period late;
this time, though, it’s eluded
me entirely. I shouldn’t worry (I’m medically regulated)
—but hell, I brought these thirty sanitary pads
all the way from Köln to Mexico, prepared
for more than metaphorical bloodletting among the glad rags
of the Festival Internacional de Poesía,
and I forbid
my body to be so cavalier.
Taking the pill is like using a safety net
but then, beforehand, having a beer—
a man’s invention to numb us so we
can’t tell which way the next wind’s blowing.
This is for the woman with one black wing
perched over her eyes: lovely Frida, erect
among parrots, in the stern petticoats of the peasant,
who painted herself a present—
wildflowers entwining the plaster corset
her spine resides in, that flaming pillar—
this priestess in the romance of mirrors.
Each night she lay down in pain and rose
to the celluloid butterflies of her Beloved Dead,
Lenin and Marx and Stalin arrayed at the footstead.
And rose to her easel, the hundred dogs panting
like children along the graveled walks of the garden, Diego’s
love a skull in the circular window
of the thumbprint searing her immutable brow.
Nothing can console me. You may bring silk
to make skin sigh, dispense yellow roses
in the manner of ripened dignitaries.
You can tell me repeatedly
I am unbearable (and I know this):
still, nothing turns the gold to corn,
nothing is sweet to the tooth crushing in.
I’ll not ask for the impossible;
one learns to walk by walking.
In time I’ll forget this empty brimming,
I may laugh again at
a bird, perhaps, chucking the nest—
but it will not be happiness,
for I have known that.
Just when hope withers, a reprieve is granted.
The door opens onto a street like in the movies,
clean of people, of cats; except it is your street
you are leaving. Reprieve has been granted,
“provisionally”—a fretful word.
The windows you have closed behind
you are turning pink, doing what they do
every dawn. Here it’s gray; the door
to the taxicab waits. This suitcase,
the saddest object in the world.
Well, the world’s open. And now through
the windshield the sky begins to blush,
as you did when your mother told you
what it took to be a woman in this life.
Out where crows dip to their kill
under the clouds’ languid white oars
she wanders, hands pocketed, hair combed tight
so she won’t feel the breeze quickening—
as if she were trying to get back to him,
find the breach in the green
that would let her slip through,
then tug meadow over the wound like a sheet.
I’ve walked there, too: he can’t give
you up, so you give in until you can’t live
without him. Like these blossoms, white sores
burst upon earth’s ignorant flesh, at first sight
everything is innocence—
then it’s itch, scratch, putrescence.
I miss that corridor drenched in shadow,
sweat of centuries steeped into stone.
After the plunge, after my shrieks
diminished and his oars sighed
up to the smoking shore,
the bulwark’s gray pallor soothed me.
Even the columns seemed kind, their murky sheen
like the lustrous skin of a roving eye.
I used to stand at the top of the stair
where the carpet flung down
its extravagant heart. Flames
teased the lake into glimmering licks.
I could pretend to be above the earth
rather than underground: a Venetian
palazzo or misty chalet tucked into
an Alp, that mixture of comfort
and gloom . . . nothing was simpler
to imagine. But it was more difficult
each evening to descend: all that marble
flayed with the red plush of privilege
I traveled on, slow nautilus
unwinding in terrified splendor
to where he knew to meet me—
my consort, my match,
though much older and sadder.
In time, I lost the capacity
for resolve. It was as if
I had been traveling all these years
without a body,
until his hands found me—
and then there was just
the two of us forever:
one who wounded,
and one who served.