A metal bowl? Doily? Birch bark? Page torn from an old book?
Ted and I decided to see her at the funeral home. To “view her” in the pine coffin. Before she was delivered to the crematorium. The undertaker commented on how “Orientals don’t show their age.” Sixty-eight, only a few years older than I am today. I looked. But I didn’t clip a wisp of hair as keepsake. I didn’t touch her clothes or her hand. It was enough to see what I would come to describe as the body that was Mother’s.
Ice? Mother once told me not to put lips or tongue on ice because the delicate skin would stick fast.
Was I afraid to kiss her on the lips, the lips that were my mother’s? Did sense even occur to me? Pumice? Bar of soap? Like both fastens and keeps at arm’s length.
(Had she wanted to go?)
•••
charms iii.
Trustfulness
Never take from a father’s shelf
Impressions of ancient reptile
Or you’ll fossilize your heart
And forever bleed out bile
•••
She Sells Seashells
Considering the Life of Mary Anning
When high tide withdraws
a shell burrows down with its foot
and should that muck harden,
the razor, say, may petrify
over millennia:
such demise may be a little girl’s good fortune.
Especially in 1811.
•
If only I believed in talismans
especially in regard to my dragonfly
possessed by stone for eons:
to make ends meet
Mary climbed a local cliff with tools
to pry out spirals—snake stones—
she’d sell to neighbors convinced
of their charming powers.
•
Mary was named
after her departed sister
who’d tossed sawdust on the kitchen hearth,
inspiring flames to her bib
and burning her to bits. Me,
I was instructed to so fear a match
when the lesson came to strike one
I twisted, shrieked, and wept. But
the penniless Annings scraped by
against the raw ocean air—
•
The verteberries, sea lilies, scuttle and thunderstones
had lodged in strata for millennia
above the English Channel and below
the Annings’ dark dank cottage. By the Saw Mill River,
my own parents stratified seeds in their garden
though weeds disallowed them
to seek the light of day ever.
•
Miss She-sells-seashells-on-the-seashore,
after a furious storm, found a flying dragon
in the Lyme Regis sediment.
Often gone all day alone
turbulence was her best companion
revealing where to look for bones.
I found an egg dyed yellow and green.
I found my mother when she’d died—I mean,
when she’d hide.
•
I did not find an Ammon’s horn.
I did find a piece of matzo beneath a tablecloth.
And I found my mother dead to which
a cousin asked, “What does that mean,
‘to find someone dead’? Lackluster? Uncaring?
Without a mirror for her little girl?”
•
Bleeding-tooth and pelican foot,
Venus comb murex, keyhole limpet—
a hobby for some, for the Annings
bought bread, maybe mutton, maybe
The Dissenters’ Theological Magazine.
Still, I wish I could’ve chiseled out a Plesiosaurus—
especially to query Genesis—to discover
something as stupendous as extinction.
•
After a common storm Mr. Anning fell from a ledge,
suffering till he died. Mary’s dog
similarly perished just feet from where she stood.
I wouldn’t want to pry into stone
over the swirling coast that cost so much.
Mary didn’t possess any such choice
and faced rude currents to stay afloat:
•
They say Miss Anning attends Col. Birch
These men of learning have sucked her brains
Richard “Dinosaur” Owen rarely stooped to dirty his hands in the field
Coprolite (fossilized feces) finely illustrated
Mary untangled seaweed from the dead woman’s hair
•
To Darwin’s professor she wrote, [the find looks like] a skeleton with a head like a pair of scissors . . . analogous to nothing. Even so, the geologist paid no attention to her transitional creature.
•
Mary’s a very clever funny Creature
said Dr. Featherstonhaugh as he purchased
the spine of a sea beast she’d found. My aunt
said that shells can be alive.
Some are left-handed, some right. Most
have a door and a foot. Very funny, I thought,
determined next holiday to search low and high.
•
King Frederick visited the Anning’s Fossil Depot
to purchase an ichthyosaur—
the crocodile with flippers, the undulating fish lizard—
was it Mary’s torso? brother Joseph’s skull?
or was the skeleton complete?
Strange how the body is so
undependable except at the last moment.
•
Some baby shells swim about,
others dig into mud flats
or latch onto random stone and stem.
When my own babies settled into silt
I had to rake them out
just as my mother’d coaxed with indulgences.
Mary’s mother at first forbade her
to clamber up those cliffs
scolded by tide and sea mist, but,
in the end, feared more the ubiquitous poorhouse.
•
Some shells have eyes. All have mouth and anus
employed to move along. I’ve watched
a sand dollar drag its pattern in the silt,
a beautiful primal moment. In Mary’s time,
marked by the reign of a Queen,
even a twenty-foot fossil gave a woman no purchase.
•
Some shells leap out of water!
Some leap off a boat’s deck
back into a more kindred habitat!
Mary bought her own house
so she could properly dust and polish
the so-called curiosities that evolved into
patriarchal—I mean, paleontological import.
•
Not so odd that a soft fleshy creature
builds a stony home
—smooth, ribbed, warty, or spiny—
from a fold excreting particles of lime.
More strange is a creature of flesh
who can’t protect herself thus
regardless of cranium or cul-de-sac residence.
•
In her commonplace book, Mary transcribed
’Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move . . .
and notes on physics and astronomy.
On large sheets of paper, she sketched the creatures
she could not present at London’s Geological Society
in person. On my typewriter, I exhumed
all sorts of impressions whether
prehistoric or from my childhood bedroom.
•
Although the warty professors visited her seaside home,
bartered then took credit for her finds
when all was done and said again
she who sold seashells
found fossils
more stellar than a tongue twister,
having had the Black Ven as taskmistress.
•
envoy:
she-sells-seashells-on-the-seashore
sold the so-called curios
some have eyes
some coprolite
most have a door and a foot
some baby shells swim about
below the coastal cliff near her home
near bleeding-tooth and pelican foot
and their healing powers but
no one wants to puzzle over
an overhanging house or stony abode or
a funny tongue-twister but
with or without a charm
a little girl can fashion a mirror of her own
•••
Likeness
A Self-Portrait
Like Professor Sara Lewis I view the meadow as theater
for passion and yearning courtship duets
competitions for affection
cruel deception and gruesome death
Like the Professor fluent in firefly I am fluent in
on-the-fly and on-the-sly
when circumstances are well well lit
•
Like a female firefly I am remarkably picky
when checking out flashy males
because long-lasting pulses
mean a lot when it comes to say nuptial gifts
—packages of protein injected with sperm—
furthermore it’s crucial to pay attention
yes I tell my daughters
pay attention to attention
•
Unlike male fireflies
who do not need to burn many extra calories
to make flashes
because only a tiny bit of energy is needed
I do
burn a lot of fuel in the service of being flashy:
shimmying at Danceteria
acting-out at the Nuyorican
leafletting at Kentile
to overthrow The Man
•
And what can I say?
like the cannibal Photuris firefly that
pounces bites then sucks the blood
of the special other
for ill-tasting chemicals
which it utilizes for protection
well, me, too—
I take her in to ward her off
•
There is also trickery in the case of the Photuris firefly
who at times sits on a blade of grass, responding
to male fireflies with deceptive flashes
mimic deceive devour
like legend like fairy tale
like office copy-room
•
Regrettably I’ve never sat in my backyard the night before
heading off to Belize
unlike Professor Sara Lewis
who found herself
—instead of mulling over coral reefs—
espying firefly sexual selection and
comparing the winks to Darwin’s thesis on
male displays of antlers and feathers
though it is true that at the book launch where Harold read Bestial
I took note of his commanding backlist
•
Lastly also like fireflies what I cook up
can present an unpleasant meal
although mine does not glow
although I wish I could produce glowy things
—sestina, sukiyaki, manifesto—
However, like firefly glow
I turned on during courtship Harold said so and
he himself is brilliant
especially at nightfall
—though not from enzymes in his tail—
•••
charms iv.
Nip in the Bud
Pull out a Queen Anne’s Lace
By every gnarled tendril
To hone your skill at tatting
As well as thwart a rival
•
Reprisal
If a sweetheart aims to stray
For a neighbor’s tryst
Find a way to shake a branch
Of nettles on her sheets
•••
Foreign Body
This is a poem on my other’s body,
I mean, my mother’s body, I mean the one
who saved her braid of blue-black hair
in a drawer, I mean the one
I could lean against—
against as in insistence. Fuzzy-dress-of-wuzzy
one. Red-lipstick one.
bad-ger bad-ger
or so I heard. The one body I write on—
her sun-flecked body
as she bathed in the afternoon.
Was I five? It was Summer.
Then Winter—where today
I call the unlocked bathroom to mind:
I cannot leave her body alone.
Which is how I found Mother
escaping the heat of a 1950s house,
Father on a ladder with blowtorch
to scrape the paint off the outside.
•
badger badger
•
The sun in those suburbs
simmered the tar roof over our rooms
in the town where the wasps lived
inside paper cells beneath both eaves and roots.
They sing—
I mean—sting very much, the wasps.
•
Now I’m sixty. Sweet as dried papaya.
My hair, a bit tarnished,
my inmost, null.
Memory is falling away
as if an image shattered to shards then
re-collected for a kaleidoscope:
I click the pieces into sharp arrangement—
bad bad girl girl
In turn, a daughter turns sovereign.
•••
After Being Asked If I Write the Occasional Poem
After leaving Raxruhá, after
crossing Mexico with a coyote,
after reaching at midnight
that barren New Mexico border,
a man and his daughter
looked to Antelope Wells
for asylum and were arrested. After
forms read in Spanish
to the Mayan-speaking father,
after a cookie but no water, after
the wait for the lone bus
to return for their turn, after boarding,
after the little girl’s temperature spiked,
she suffered two heart attacks,
vomited, and stopped breathing. After
medics revived the seven-year-old
at Lordsburg Station, after
she was flown to El Paso where she died,
the coroner examined
the failed liver and swollen brain. Then,
Jakelin’s chest and head were stitched up
and she returned to Guatemala
in a short white coffin
to her mother, grandparents,
and dozens of women preparing
tamales and beans to feed the grieving.
In Q’eqchi’, w-e means mouth.
•••
Alloy
An Apostrophe for Isamu Noguchi
Is stone the opposite of dust? And if so, are we then stone before dust? And before that, some kind of betwixt? The mush inside a translucent chrysalis turning cellophane-clear when, of a sudden,
you can see the monarch throbbing and scratching its way into air—
unlike a centipede that lays eggs, even curls around them with her hundred feet. You said that living in Japan
our house was filled with centipedes. I became rather fond of them; I lost my fear. You know, when you kill one, the two halves just walk off.
Surely they played in your mind all the way to your piece “Even the Centipede,”
&nb
sp; molded from Ibaraki clay—though you felt in a medium like clay anything can be done;
and stated, I think that’s dangerous. It’s too fluid. Too facile.
Under your instruction, I’ll find what’s too fluid for me and turn my scratching away from facile to fossil
using hammer, chisel, and drill if lucky enough to come across the right quarry and ask nice enough or pay enough
for a crew to blast out the marble—unless the material is residue from something else. Glacial pain?
I mean, glacial moraine
•
from my home near the Sound where a glacier once aborted boulders onto these lean beaches.
I pick up a rock rounded and chipped in the surf, then, back home, like those who set Jizo on boulevard altars in Kyoto,
I tie a bib around its belly then place it on our mantel. Like those women, I, too, remember my baby unborn from betwixt and
Japanese. Japanese like those on the land where dust storms blew farm families to smithereens, then, blew desert
through rows of barracks surrounded by barbed wire and gunner watchtowers. Even orphan babies,
with one drop of Jap blood, were seized from whatever charity to live in bowls of dust. And you, Noguchi-sensei,
volunteered yourself into this incarceration limbo with the goal to build a baseball diamond, swimming pool, and cemetery;
you entered Poston Internment, where you knew yourself a Nisei, that is, without the rights of a citizen: request, of course, denied.
(Not for nothing, you were despised on both sides.) And as for centipedes
I’m not so much afraid as squeamish, which is different, and I’ve never killed one by cutting it in half
so I don’t know about the two alive sides. The split selves not seeing eye-to-eye, I know only too well.