unnerved and fallen from the reach of your amazed
groping dream that everything lives twice.
That dream hurts me the best. I depend on it.
Get a new envelope and make one new pinhole.
Just one hole. Don’t try to save the others.
Don’t bother. I’m the lucky one. It’s me. Me!
Card 8: Strength
What did god say
to the friendless woman whose child
was ill and whose home was lost?
“And it’s only Wednesday!”
4. FAMILY TRIP
Family Trip
We never knew closer
sisters, stronger trees,
tighter clans, wilder
fires. Where can we
go if not to each other,
resenting every step?
I Wish I Had More Sisters
I wish I had more sisters,
enough to fight with and still
have plenty more to confess to,
embellishing the fight so that I
look like I’m right and then turn
all my sisters, one by one, against
my sister. One sister will be so bad
the rest of us will have a purpose
in bringing her back to where
it’s good (with us) and we’ll feel
useful, and she will feel loved.
Then another sister
will have a tragedy, and again,
we will unite in our grief, judging
her much less than we did the bad
sister. This time it was not
our sister’s fault. This time
it could have happened to any
of us and in a way it did. We’ll
know she wasn’t the only
sister to suffer. We all suffer
with our choices, and we
all have our choice of sisters.
My sisters will seem like a bunch
of alternate me, all the ways
I could have gone. I could see
how things pan out without
having to do the things myself.
The abortions, the divorces,
the arson, swindles, poison jelly.
But who could say they weren’t
myself, we are so close. I mean,
who can tell the difference?
I could choose to be a fisherman’s
wife since I’d be able to visit
my sister in her mansion, sipping
bubbly for once, braying
to the others who weren’t invited.
I could be a traveler, a seer,
a poet, a potter, a flyswatter.
None of those choices would be
as desperate as they seem now.
My life would be like one finger
on a hand, a beautiful, usable, ringed,
wrung, piano-and-dishpan hand.
There would be both more and less
of me to have to bear. None of us
would be forced to be stronger
than we could be. Each of us could
be all of us. The pretty one.
The smart one. The bitter one.
The unaccountably-happy-
for-no-reason one. I could be,
for example, the hopeless
one, and the next day my sister
would take my place, and I would
hold her up until my arms gave way
and another sister would relieve me.
Magi
If only you’d been a better mother.
How could I have been a better mother?
I would have needed a better self,
and that is a gift I never received.
So you’re saying it’s someone else’s fault?
The gift of having had a better mother myself,
my own mother having had a better mother herself.
The gift that keeps on not being given.
Who was supposed to give it?
How am I supposed to know?
Well, how am I supposed to live?
I suppose you must live as if you had been
given better to live with. Comb your hair, for instance.
I cut off my hair, to sell for the money
I wanted nothing but your happiness.
I can’t give you that!
What would Jesus do?
He had a weird mother too…
Use the myrrh, the frankincense, as if
it were given unconditionally, your birthright.
It’s a riddle.
All gifts are a riddle, all lives are
in the middle of mother-lives.
But it’s always winter in this world.
There is no end to ending.
The season of giving, the season
when the bears are never cold,
because they are sleeping.
The bears are never cold, Mama,
but I am one cold, cold bear.
My Water Children
They could have been anyone,
no one special. I didn’t need
them to be angels or stars.
But to me, they were a boy
and twin girls. Like ink soaking
through from the other side
of the page I write on now,
they form no images, no story.
A crack in the wall admitted
no spider, no draft, but only
because there was no wall.
Often, as a child, when I did
something wrong and got away
with it, I thought a ghost
or spirit or a kind of assistant
god (not the Real God, who was
too busy for the souls of children
and it turns out that is true)
would bleed through to me
from the skin of the other world,
cut by my misdeed or sin,
and catch me. I wanted to be seen,
known for what I truly was:
a bad child, unlike the perfect
water children I would never have
the chance to know.
Vacation
for Mark and Paul
1
When the mind walks without language,
there is no boardwalk; there is no Board;
there is no boredom; and there are no feet,
legs or yards, coin or meter. No measure,
no miles. What is freedom if not freedom
from distance? From speaking lines?
2
The leaves, little green lamps for the sunblind.
3
Blue fingertips. Could mean a beach-party
manicure or a corpse. Or: and a corpse.
To be touched intimately by blue fingertips.
To put it more bluntly: to be fingered
by the pool in which you drown.
4
Why not sparkle if given a choice and you’ve
had enough sleep? Why not give back
a tiny grain of what you’ve been given from
night’s endlessness and guaranteed breathing?
I have fractured only so minute a corner
of the deadest, most useless bone in the sky’s
body, how can I not make a kite of it?
How can I keep even the broken glass
to myself, drinking nothing out of nothing?
5
To swim is to let god know you won’t take it
lying down nor will you just lie down and take it.
6
Solemn toes respond directly even to the most
frivolous mind. What other rules but bent
rules? Can I love you from the other
side of the conversation? From the other side
of the brown-feathered space of the table?
Of the living, eaten egg and sunrise and sleep-
eyes wet from night?
7
The tiny grain of sand in the eye. The single
flap that lands the bird into the lonely next,
the only nest in the sea. The glimmer that
proves contact has been made. Dear child,
wild sea, closed eye. Far, loving air.
8
Walking in the sand—am I under the sun
or dangling over it, first by one foot
and then the other?
9
This cerulean weather and its yellow talons.
The afternoon on the brink of drink. My ears
are plugged with wax and seawater, utterly
corked. The light has to widen to include
the music I can’t hear. I am hoping the god
of catastrophe—barbecue, lightning, riptide—
has smarter fish to fry. Suddenly the scruffy
deer appears, as it often does in poems, a dark-
eyed child dreaming in a dream.
10
Where oh where is that one leaf?
Cover the Lamp with Its Own Light
Though I am well,
and deep, and fall asleep well,
I am not the wisher that I am.
I think that just thinking about
lighting the way and lighting
a match are the same thing,
is the same thing as doing either.
With both hands the same thing
and that thing is me. But it’s
all the time, every day. But no.
It’s not for me to say.
It’s not heatlight’s way to have
me in heatlight’s way saying
no light today or heat will pay.
When golden oak leaves, real
gold, real leaf, flaked thickly
all over my wonderful dull self
with a gleam like fresh paper
what did the old boulder say,
in a waste of words?
“Some kind of freak lives next door,
a fish-striped alien
on an earplug binge who simply
will not acknowledge she’s being
called home.” Home! Home!
But nobody’s called me, nobody’s
home. There isn’t even a phone.
Perhaps I’ll start working alone,
on two separate films,
enrobed in a copycat
body, a leaping projection,
for isn’t that what we do?
Leap. A larger footprint
than creature. An aluminum
filling doubling as a bulletproof
vest that’s been tested
as a way out through the window.
The window of curved mirror,
of salt, the window of it all,
the latched feeling,
to quit patching the baby,
for example (did you know
there was a baby? You’d think
he’d be mentioned by now,
but the things I choose not to say
might keep you wondering to the end
of the page, the fat page, the fat
unmentionable this and that),
onto the habit of the baby.
Where is the quilt? The boulder-
edged quilt. The one used for Earth
Day. The stained, strange,
fleshlike quilt, fortress, green-feared,
many-colored dress.
It was my costume,
it was my stained-red pink thing
all last year. It was my rag doll
concubine shrink honey
girlfriend hag that I had to have
at home or I wouldn’t go home.
If my wish is anything more
than a graft, a draft,
a cover, ten thousand lovers
in the space of one, then I will take
all three: these wishes: baby,
body, poem. Or body, hobby,
bone. And make them as true
as a genie can make them come.
True as a field in lamplight,
as a stone believing it’s all alone.
With my wishes I can kill them
twice, and still get them back:
maybe, body, prone.
Unbelievable that it is still today.
How much more of it is left?
How much more of tomorrow?
I am not greedy. I ask because
I hope for less than I have coming.
I am not more than I hoped
to be in my prayers
in my girlhood, in my bonfire.
Not in my ungodly unuttered
then-ness. If that old boulder
ever lived a day with any burden
but itself then I will lift its hard-
meat to a place of honor.
Super-polished on the very top
of the world’s biggest root.
I am not ungrateful. I will face
the stranger’s face in any light
from any lamp or lucky gold
three-wish thing. I will not
wish for two things and then use
the third wish for three more.
I won’t take more than I have,
and I don’t have to want
what I already have from before.
It’s too quiet and sorry to want,
and the place of wanting is too sore
to stuff it with hard rock,
hard luck, or it’s too far back
to even see the stuff anymore.
I’m open. I’m old. I just want
the wishing to go back home
or to send me back, in its place,
to where the giving is given out.
Mermaid’s Purse
There is no such thing as sacrifice,
though the bleeding doesn’t end.
The self is the self yet bigger than itself.
Indebted. And subordinate
to the unity of its fragments,
loopholes in the loop of wholeness.
Cat sharks lay their eggsacs,
which eat themselves in gestation,
for if fewer mature sharks,
bigger portions at the feast
of the loggerhead turtle, which
will never again be a single entity.
Out of one, many. If blameless,
then meaningless, dissolved
by a cloud of sardines, flashing
silver as if paying for breakfast
in a silent movie starring no stars.
Vanity
To think that, in my sorrow,
I thought it was permissible to flick
myself away like a fly from the full-length
mirror on opening night. Curled the hot
hair around my crowded face,
warming up the audience for a flop.
I thought I’d be bought something,
by one who admired me. Some lost meal,
hours of fat drink check, a copselike rope
of rubies for my waist. But no. I’m selfsame:
a wordsmith wearing too much paint,
my inking irons heavy in the rain.
The night is an imperfect story
for us all. It leaves things out.
The witch’s song can’t prove itself
beautiful enough to sing at dawn
for the enchanted child
in an ordinary story about the night.
No small favor, no laughing matter.
Pass the meat through a slot
in the chamber. This whole self
can be as silent as a chain saw rusted
on the broken fever of my song’s rain,
my night’s story, my ink iron’s brains.
In spite of the spot-checking,
the self-seeking, the meticulous soul-smithing,
I am still me, lacking.
Like murders in books, but with reverse
precision, how anyone becomes h
erself
is a mystery. A miracle. A myth.
5. OUR ANDROMEDA
At the Book Shrink
one learns to say “My body uses me
as a grape uses wine”—
to talk about inevitability,
the essence of plot.
But what happens when a person
understands she is being sent
back, glass by glass,
to the invisible pouring stations
of the larger narrative?
That she is merely like or likely
a person in a book?
Like a saltwater balloon
sinking in the ocean.
Like a person in a book, like