I
Great men will tell us how they rose from nothing.
But Mom’s a teenage heartbreak, deadly bright
blue jay in the snow, her vivid black beak queenly
inside a flush of blue. She’s a prologue the size
of a whole book—she’s real poppies
that will make you sleep—so much
motherland in her, I’m adrift in an age
of not giving up.
A fog lies over everything when she’s upset.
People used to live in the attic, ones
who snuck down when we went out, to use the toilet and steal the spoons—
Nothing’s up there! I said. Though
I had no idea—
Mom writing down license plates while
we sat in the car outside the bakery
eating croissants—so many similarities in numbers. It can be
beauty to see.
Mom danced topless for the soldiers headed to war.
“Probably be the last thing I see before I hit the shit,”
one man told her.
And
Blue, here is a shell for you—
Text messages like leaves on a river
moving swiftly toward
the vast sea of misunderstanding.
Wouldn’t it be nice to live more than one lifetime?
I want to be something else for a little while.
I’m the village idiot savant standing at an empty
wishing well, lighting a joint and getting paranoid,
telling one yarn after another to anyone who will listen.
Mom was always changing her name, asking to be called
something different. One day she went into the courthouse
and wrote the name Blue Jay on a blank line; the jay that will gather all the other jays
when a dead one is found, assemble the others to grieve—
the name’s still on her license like a hieroglyph;
unusable, dust long ago gathered upon—
Who are you? she asked one night
standing beside the four-poster bed in the dark—who
ARE you?
You know me, don’t you?
I can’t
remember all the words
to that one lullaby; I’ve grown backward and down.
No room to sit,
no private place to plunder,
tall as the tallest French bisque doll in the house
but I barely fit into these collections of genius,
never shipped
into society, only stockpiled
for the end of the world.
I bought her Mind Whispering. And The Motivation Manifesto.
I bought The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, left it among the Jewish-mysticism books
and later it appeared in a pile by the front door.
“Take your self-help book back with you,” she said,
filling a glass with ice and Diet Pepsi
like an ocean wave foaming over stones—
My holes were empty like a cup,
In every hole sea came up
Till it could come no more.
Enough, enough!
Now I start my own cult.
I lead
some commune of rapture
for these wounds. But it does no good.
Instead everyone commits
great big acts of suicide together in my head.
Back during our brief Mormon days
Mom wouldn’t let us go to temple
out in Utah and baptize the dead.
“But I can baptize your father,” I insisted,
who’d hanged himself all those years ago.
“He was a Jew,” Mom said. “He doesn’t want
to be baptized into the three Mormon heavens.”
And that was that.
Soon after, we stopped attending, and really
I was glad. I didn’t want to baptize the dead so much
as get into a swimming pool and be held down
by a gentle hand of the priesthood.
“Your brother got too serious,” Mom said, smoking
in the car in her wool jacket with the elastic loops for shotgun shells
and the flannel insert and loose M&M’s in the pockets
(I loved her in that coat). “He said I was sinning for drinking coffee.”
Nowadays it’s, like, two cocktails and my endorphins are spent,
with a big shiny silver dollar, and I’m an old doll
that talks gibberish when pulled apart.
I rush home
with my golden ticket of shit
and pass out in the empty tub.
No one will talk about her father’s death in a new way.
It came out quietly that he liked to wear women’s clothes—
tenderly, Mom tells me this—
His unfinished dissertation that crumbles in my hands;
his poems from 1943, student soldier ballads done
with quivering golf pencils—
I’m so alone, I’m so alone without you
my darling—
Oh, I wish him on her!
Wish him on her to be loved!
To be loved properly by a father probably feels great.
Like winning a medal.
There’s so much joy in this poem. I’m trying
to convey how much
I love my mother, the way I love birds.
The blue jay always
is the biggest bird around the bird feeder—makes
strange, loud songs,
a little aggressive, but gorgeous, known
for its intelligence and complex social systems
with tight family bonds, a biblical fondness for acorns,
spreading oak trees into existence
after the last glacial period.
I don’t want you to think I’m stealing these things
from your life. What is stealing when it’s your own
body parts, manufactured and passed down?
Like a cameo brooch looking out across the hills
of the breastbone, layers of skin and fat,
important bacteria from the vagina,
bracelets rattling on an arm—
sometimes it’s just the way the hair falls
off the skull, or the glass eyeball
that rolls around at night
on the floor of the cave in your dark mind.
What of those immigrant Lithuanian Jews
who all married goyim with red hair?
After his wife died, Great-Uncle Jack, your father’s brother,
wouldn’t throw anything out,
filling his house with newspapers and New Yorkers—
but Oh his seders in Baltimore we screamed through, so happy,
the delicious sounds of his muttering Hebrew—
can we go back?
This poem is for you, hoarders of my blood.
The gentle climate of mothers that shakes the White House
—and other times drives you
insane with silence. The silent treatment,
the defining absence of noise,
like an expanding stain, damp and long,
face of need,
need more forceful the longer it gets—typing out
sad sentences like a telegram into the hands
of the wrong person—
my sweet placemat I place at my table each day.
When I sit down with a blue jay, the seeds fall out of my mouth.
Do you know the game?
The game is leading you out of the dark
and then you long to go back in—
or blowing into your hands to make a fire
or building something on top of another thing
and one is more fragile than the other.
My sister and I
are stars in our own reality show
that no one watches but us
(“Has Mom responded?”)
spread out in omnipotent banter
waiting for our relationship with Mom to really begin
To be loved without a fight
with a calm center—not
passing a mood around like a screaming infant
this black-market DVD collection
that cannot be watched
except when the moon is waning
and no one paid the electric bill
and they’re threatening to take the house
and the hostile cats are locked in the bathroom—
and then
you can’t look away
for anything.
Watch me loving you forever, Mom, on this strip of land
we call grief—but it is only life!
Do you know the game?
The game is called Being Unhappy, Just in Case.
or Gratitude as a Weakness.
And we play sometimes when there is nothing else to do.
Thunder & lightning outside turns to reverence.
Realizing your parents are just human
is a large part of mature development.
Some people never get there,
and being there is evanescent.
Suddenly this need for honey in everything; seasickness bands
on my wrists remind me of my old perversity,
blackout incisions on the skin, an injury, open-eye-shaped, woman’s-shame-shaped—
Get up out of the internet, Lawnmower Man!
I’m concerned about the way we keep looking
for something to ease the pain—
I’m not yet like a Navy SEAL, the way they love it
when things are miserable.
Living is enduring painful situations.
But Living, certainly, is not Reality,
which, as we know, is such a lark, Mom, don’t we?
*
An exotic bird comes to solve herself in the backcloth of ash trees.
I dream again I am so articulate
with my vicious insults.
Grief for the living will ruin your appetite.
How much do bird species watch other bird species?
“Like blue terriers”
Emily Dickinson said of the jays.
Mimicking the cry of a hawk—
the Old World jay who will intuit his female’s state of mind
and find her the food she most desires—
the jay will watch closely and keep track.
Being loved depends upon it.
I’ve been watching you from this damp branch,
the wily sun
across your sullen face, your bones among your features,
your mouth curled, beautiful, angry—a child’s lips
that whorl on a word.
Your sisters—from the same Edenic womb,
who crossed the red sea of the maddening mother—
cannot reason together.
Just jays scattered across the country surviving on
the delicacy of larvae.
The seed feeder swinging like a crystal pendulum saying
Yes—
“I miss you in the world,” I said to you yesterday, sitting on the couch while
you threaded tiny Italian imported beads onto string
in your manor of magnificent lamps
illuminating;
the veil Dickinson noticed
hovering over the imperfectly beheld face
fluttering
with your out-breath of cigarette smoke,
an old wound reddening around you,
your genius trapped like a moth on the screened-in porch of your pain—
waiting in your house for a miracle. Oh,
Mother—it will never come without your consent.
*
Mothers are all I have ever known.
And my loyalty, never amassed enough. My labyrinth. My confusion of jays, my
“cacophonous aggregation.” University of humor
and ingenious abilities
I come back to again and again, to hang out and argue
—dearest playmate, won’t you come out
and play with me?
“I’m dead and in hell. I’ve known that for years,” you say.
And I step quietly back into the night.