When the sulfuric stench of the paper mill
wakes me at night, I rise from bed
to find my vial of vanilla cologne
and spritz it twice on the pillow case.
Now, face-down on scented cotton,
I escape the fetid downwind creep
and fall asleep instead to the false
sweetness of rising yellow cake.
And sometimes, too, I spray perfume
on my son’s sheets, or hold my wrist
to his nose, so that after I’ve died,
the smell of vanilla will return me to him—
overcoming, briefly, the foul smell of loss.
The Dybbuk
I fatten myself inside her body.
Licking red wine from my half-formed lips,
I suck in thick cream, gnaw at steaming beef.
Each time she wails on the couch, I gain a pound.
Sometimes I think she knows I’m here,
nestled beside her wet and thrumming heart.
When she talks to herself, I listen carefully,
and have learned all the names:
her husband, her sister, the men I watch her watch
through the peepholes of her eyes.
Everything I see is tinted blue.
Her tears are unpleasant.
She listens to the same sad songs on the stereo.
Pathetic! I’ll put a stop to that when I’m born.
My fingernails are growing, opalescent bone,
and my hair will be long, the color of rhubarb.
It won’t be long now.
Already, I’m finding slits in her soft white skin.
I’m finding all the holes.
I Watched You Disappear
That fucking doctor killed you. Killed you.
But I keep sending e-mails to your account. It’s still open.
Your husband told me he heard you calling him the other night.
You should see the way he matches your daughter’s clothes.
You would snort water out of your nose laughing.
Today a green hummingbird hovered right before my face.
Are you there? Where?
Are the others there, too?
You looked like Stevie Nicks in your scarf and sunglasses.
That trip to Peru never happened. You should have spent the money.
You were so thin by the end.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
Your son is on suicide watch. He can’t be left alone.
I keep finding your feathers.
Is it true that the morphine worked? The nurses were just guessing,
near the end.
I’m sorry that I didn’t want your nightgown. I should have taken it.
It scared me too much.
I give it one year, max.
I hate spring, its prettiness.
Your heart kept beating. Why didn’t it just stop?
You left in a bandana from your drawer of bandanas.
You pulled yourself up one last time on the bed rails.
You left into No More Letters.
You left three translations of Akhmatova.
You left your Lady of Guadalupe by the window.
You left your lungs, liver, spine.
You left in the thinnest hours of the morning.
You left on your last out breath.
You left into silence.
You left me. You left them. You left us.
I watched you disappear.
Skirts and Dresses
My pants hang, deflated, in the closet.
It’s been weeks since my legs filled them,
since a button rested beneath my navel.
My body craves dresses, a single seam falling
from shoulder to knee; or else skirts, side-
zipped, hooked, sheen of fine cotton,
sky-blue; or red wool above high black boots.
To sweep my hand under me and smooth
the silk before I sit, to rest cross-legged
and tuck my feet beneath the tented cloth.
Or to lift the hems like a hammock
for gathering acorns and cedar cones.
To walk with air on my calves, legs bare.
To skim the hips, to slim the thighs.
Because the razor of illness is at my skull.
Because I have no time to lose before
the waning, untrimming, the casting off.
Let me slip into something beaded, lacey, fine.
Let a dress fall softly from its hanger
the way I first fell into my husband’s arms.
Let me feel again, and again, like that.
New Dress
Hello, lovely disguise. Come swing short and loose
rise from your yellow folds like a virgin. Absorb
in your stitching my wrist’s vanilla, the sweat of fear,
a hasty last morsel of soup, or blood from a bandage
pulled off too soon. And those gazes I scorned
when I was younger—accept them eagerly now,
not knowing how long my face will stay,
how long I’ll be able to walk on these legs, slim
in black tights, before sickness forces me flat.
When no man will want me for a lover, or dream
of pulling you over my head, you’ll caress me,
won’t you? You’ll be with me, faithful friend,
when my body starts to turn.
Sexually Explicit Lyrics, Ash Wednesday
Because I will never have sex like this again,
I listen to the music and sing as if I will,
as if I weren’t on the short spur to death,
now that tumors freckle my right lung,
sparkling on the PET scan like tossed confetti.
Oh yes, I can pretend that I’ll get whatever I like,
can imagine my body made up of cells shimmering
like my headlights on the wet road, late for church.
I can dream of how it was when I had decades
left of sex and of somebody wanting my body—
this body, that seeks now a space in the pews,
and kneels in silence for the placement of ashes.
For the thick black cross that will put an end
to all that false, sweet crooning, that will settle
into the folds of my forehead, more obscene
than the words, earlier, purring in my throat.
II
Owl Maiden
No transformation’s instant.
Her hair fell out first, replaced by quills.
Then her feet shriveled like lemon rind,
the nails hooking back into talons.
Her mouth lost its curl in a bill’s peck
and snap, in a shrill new tongue.
Her eyes blinked and rounded like coins.
The spell can’t be unspoken, no potions,
she knows, can reverse her bloodstream’s
bitter tides. Her beloved stands rooted,
watching her flap her hollowed bones.
What terror she inspires now,
perched in some bare and wintry birch.
Her weeping, a shriek. An omen.
Maiden in the Glass Mountain
Transparency’s the terror:
the princess not trapped in a cave,
or enslaved underground in a dungeon,
but seated motionless, locked in crystal.
Anyone who cares to look can see her.
And she, too, watches the world move past.
The weddings, babies, cakes, lessons.
Headaches, hemlines, savings accounts
opened and jobs resigned. Still she sits,
pretending to be part of the life around her.
She thinks how trite her sentence sounds.
Familiar as sand, salt, sparrows.
She knows she’ll never find a way out, now.
The villagers want her to smile. So she smiles.
Strawberries in Snow
Belief comes easily to the ill.
Miracles fall from their lips like gems,
are worn like secret amulets. A woman,
I’m told, brushed her steps of snow
and found the very thing she craved,
strawberries fresh as early summer,
dimpled sweet and red beneath the rime.
Pink climbed back to her ailing cheeks,
the way new blood makes the body sing.
And yet, no one talks of her sister,
who also searched, found nothing there.
She swept and swept until she fell.
I’ve been so good, she wept, the wind
remorseless over earth that wouldn’t bear.
The Burned Ones
She smells the burning of her skin.
Goose feathers, frog slime—no matter.
In the heat, it splits open. Oh raw one,
wailing one, stripped and flayed by fire,
can fingers knot the flying threads of blood?
Many times, the wind and mountains take her,
and she’s lost beyond the reach of any hands.
But sometimes, a man or woman will hold her
as she changes—scorpion, locust, hedgehog,
broom—till she reverts again to human form—
lovely whole girl with her breasts full of milk
and a child with a birth scar shaped like a star.
of their anger then? Will they ever be free?
Silver Hands
When the evil thing bared its sooty teeth,
the girl offered her wrists to the knife.
Two stumps, cauterized by weeping.
Now she wears a pair of silver hands,
nurses her child like any other mother,
her scars the pink of star magnolias.
At night, the hands lie in a casket by her bed.
She dreams the way her fingers picked
apart the knots in unclasped chains,
or plaited paper hearts for Valentines.
She hopes her son, the one she baptized
Sorrowful, will play guitar. He’ll hold
late summer’s plums up to her mouth
so she can suck the sweetness from the stones.
The Flowered Skull
The magician finds them, young or old,
mothers, maidens—to him, no matter—
and with a touch he stuffs them in his sack.
No saving them, then, from his appalling
tricks, from his relentless tortures.
One more body for his storeroom,
one more woman starved and swollen,
left sightless, speechless, full of stones.
But this girl’s clever—she’s set a trap.
The skull’s festooned with yellow roses.
Veiled and jeweled, the waiting bride.
She’ll burn her captor up to grease and ash.
He’s ruin, teeth, and knots of hair.
She’s honey and feathers, free as air.
The Hazel Tree
The mother died and grew into a tree.
Through the loam, she webbed her roots,
bones branching, leafing, ripe with sap.
In time, her body fruited, rich and brown,
each nut a word she’d grown to tell her son
now that her speaking human voice was gone:
that she’d chanted stories in his blood,
sown language in his eyes so he could dream.
He hears the cooing of the mourning dove,
its black band pulsing as it sings. The day-
light’s gold and glass and soft gray wings.
for Noah
III
Doors
1.
My grandparents’ door was magic,
yellow as apple wine. Behind it,
people spoke in kind voices.
My grandmother passed plates
through a window from the kitchen
to the dining room table.
No one in that house seemed to hurry.
A doe could have walked in,
her face like a Renaissance Madonna,
while my grandfather turned a page
of his enormous album of stamps.
2.
The door on Crum Ledge, I don’t remember.
The door on Elm Avenue was a rented one,
not really ours. The back door led to ferns,
mosquitoes, and my mother hanging laundry.
The door on Juniata Avenue wore for years
a sticker, “This house protected by multiple
alarm systems,” which wasn’t true.
The mailbox was deep and enameled blue.
Now, only my mother keeps a key.
My father’s door, #101, does not lock
from the inside, in case he falls down
and can’t get up at night.
3.
The dorm room was number 2B.
Beneath it, someone had penciled
“Or not 2B.” I wept as my parents left.
4.
The Quaker Meetinghouse sat, dark
and solid as a cake. Its brass doorknobs
cold, its windows lit with marigolds.
At midnight, Easter morning, we banged
on the sky blue doors, but Christ is risen,
the bass voice boomed. Inside, candles
replaced the vigil’s gloom. The doors,
the doors! In wisdom let us attend!
The golden doors, the holy doors,
world without end.
On the bimah, the Torah unrolled, a silver
finger pointed to childless Hannah’s cries.
September’s swallows wheeled and dove.
I prayed for a boy, an egg leaped in my womb.
The Temple’s doors unlocked this holy day,
my body, too, opened its room to joy.
Ubi Caritas Deus Ibi Est
Where there is charity, there God is.
But there was no charity in my taut face
when, my blood still warm with wine,
I hissed at my son for kicking
the pews; and none in the threats
I used when he carelessly dropped
the hymnal on my knee; no pity
in the way I dragged his wrists
past the candles’ smoking,
ruby-throated prayers, or in
the spiteful snap of the car seat.
But that night, when he called from his bed
and I smelled the hot vomit on his quilt,
when I stripped the sheets, wiped clean
his face and changed his reeking shirt,
lying beside him till he slept,
then, like a rabbit, I crept beneath
God’s wide skirts, and the reckless dogs
that chase me heeled and whined,
unable to follow into that warm domed
darkness where Love tucked me near
like a bell’s clapper and my tongue
rang sweet, for once, to hear.
Perigee Moon, Loose Tooth
It’s been eighteen years since the full moon
shone this brilliant, since its orbit
brought it wobbling so close to earth.
The perigee moon, ivory of dogwood
blossoms, following its egg-shaped path,
ancient celestial tortoise, unwavering.
In nineteen ninety-three, I was twenty-four,
and moony-eyed about the man I’d marry soon.
Now our son’s lost his first front tooth—
the five-dollar tooth—his tongue busy
wiggling the second to pay day.
In eighteen years, he’ll be twenty-four.
Our lives, as tide drawn as lunar dust.
I’m peering into his vaulted mouth
,
as though I might read there his zodiac
of canines, incisors, the six-year molars
grinding through his gums.
Bone-white
tooth, moon, hyacinth blooms—
each of these rises, drops, rises again,
follows its courses, marks time, shines.
Like when I was six, the quarter beneath
my pillow that I held up to one eye,
perigee, a silver halo of possibility.
My Son’s Legs
My son’s legs are solid as pestles
and runic stones,
as tapered as larch trees.
I delight in the perfection of his legs.
It’s for him that our ancestors
reared up and stuttered across the plains.
For him that those on two legs
slowly straightened their spines
and rolled back Promethean shoulders.
So that my son can walk through the house
in his underwear when he should be sleeping.
So that I can turn him out of my room
on his glorious legs—
no firebird’s golden feathers more precious
than those corn cob thighs.
No seraphims’ burning wings more glorious
than those calves unbloomed with veins.
And those wide, always dirty feet,
that run when they should walk.
Twinned staffs, swords, thunderbolts!
Chasing a Grasshopper at the
Ocmulgee Indian Mounds
No one knows the purpose of this gashed
earth, this trench that splits the field.
The dog, thirsty and thick with burrs,
creeps down its sides, while my son lies
on his belly and pretends to shoot marauders.
At bottom, the grasses grow in hoops
and tangles, tunnels of red-brown stems
and silvery weeds. It’s past Thanksgiving,
the crickets almost gone, but here’s a grass-
hopper, three-legged, leaping and skating
across the spines of stalks. Murder’s forgotten.
The boy flings himself at this live thing,