So much screaming in a small place
In a cage for a house cat, a cheetah
There is too much room in the shoe
The shoe’s too big for you
The fish flopping in a bucket
Waddling through the orange grove, a wounded duck
So much screaming in that freedom
Butterfly on a windshield, clinging to a breeze
But, listen. I, too, stole something once only to stuff it in the trash
Together, me and you, thieves in one another’s shoes at last
Or, better yet—
Have we become one another now, running barefoot in the grass
The mystical, final physics of that
Passion-in-July
I am the flower called Passion-in-July. Thirstless, yellow, growing in profusion under the awning of the condemned bordello in the morning.
No. No.
I bloom in the garden of the aging phys ed teacher in the middle of the night. She dreams of herself in the humid gymnasium, the walls lined with fur, the children running around her in mad circles. She wakes up not perspiring, but burning, singing, Farewell, you cool violets in your shady hollows. You delicacies longing for water. I am the flower called Passion-in-July. Not sad. Not sky. If I could laugh, it would be
in the face of the cemetery, virginity—those two mossy knolls.
It would be at the expense of the canvas shoe and its white laces, rubber soles.
Cigarettes
Back then, we smoked them. In
every family photo, someone’s smoking.
Such ashes, such sarcasm, the jokes
that once made loved ones
who are dead now laugh and laugh.
Cigarette in hand.
Standing glamorously at the mantel.
The fire glowing
ahead and behind
and all the little glasses
and the snow outside
filling up the birdbaths, the open graves, the eyes.
And the orchestras in gymnasiums!
That mismanagement
of sound. The wonderful
smoke afterward
in parking lots, in lungs. How
homeliness was always followed
by extravagance back then.
Like hearing lovemaking
in another room
or passing suffering
on the side of the road
without even slowing down:
So it is to remember
such times
and to see them again
so vividly in the mind.
Like a mysterious child
traveling toward us
on a moonless night
holding a jar
containing a light.
Cytoplasm, June
The earth, spewing forth creatures.
Creatures, running wildly down mountainsides, stampeding over prairies, streaming from their holes and homes, frothing through rivers into lakes—feathers, fur, skin, hair, hooves, scales, claws. And all the subtle, separate emotions endured by them—expressed by lovers, induced by drugs. Birth, pain, terror. Humiliation. The terrible dull despair of a long drive through a large state beside a spouse who has grown over the decades to hate you.
Every morning we wake tethered to this planet by a rope around the ankle. Tied fast to a pole—but also loose, without rules, in an expanding universe. Always the dream of being a child afloat in the brilliant blue of the motel pool falling away, and an old man with cancer waking up on a bed of nails. Please, don’t remember me this way, the world would like to say. And yet…
This is the entirety of the lesson. The lesson you learn from loving so greatly that which hath forsaken you:
It is a very, very small lesson. But not as small as you—
You, who are both a speck of dust drifting in silence out of the sky onto its brief gauzy wing, and the passing fancy of that passing damselfly.
Riddle
We are a little something, God’s riddle seems to suggest.
Little memories.
Little wisdoms.
Little matches,
bright or snuffed.
Where did my grandmother go when she pulled her curtains closed?
I watched her window fade
from the backseat of my father’s car, thinking
She is ancientness. She has lived forever. It has driven her insane.
But the New Old.
When did they grow
So Old?
Some of them are sleeping in the hallway.
Some are in their rooms
listening to rock ’n’ roll.
This moment of wisdom, I cast you off.
This grand foolishness, I embrace you.
And my father—the kindest, cleanest
man I’ll ever know—
is spitting on the floor, demanding to know where I came from.
THREE
The knot
The knot in the mind. That pounding thought. The cricket all night. That bright singing knot. That meditation on knots, which is a goat. The child who will be the knot of its love. This love like a knot concealed in a cloud. This death-obsessed knot with a backache, a knot-ache, holding its eye to a microscope. This loosening knot, and its greatest hope. This knot that is energy transferred into form. The knot of an eye. Not asleep. Not awake. But waiting, this knot. Like machinery parked beneath a tent made of gauze. This cramped signature on a piece of paper. A thickening knot. An egg like a knot. Not a fist in a lake, this knot of a stranger. Not the bureaucrat’s stamp on the folder of our fate. But a knot nonetheless, and not of our making.
Animal, vegetable, mineral, mist
It rose all day over the snow
in the warm unseasonable so.
Evocative of yes. Suggestive
of no.
While the ants underground continued
their mindless knowing, and the children
in the sweatshop
went about their childish sewing.
The optimistic mist insists There is a God.
The pessimistic mist shrugs. Perhaps
there is, but you’ll never know. And I
am reminded of the beautiful housekeeper at the seaside
resort so many years ago—
how busy she was flushing stars and doves
down the radiant toilet with her radiant wand
in waves and roars
in her gray clothes.
Too, the bit of fluff I watched
rise one Sunday morning from the hole
in a teenage boy’s down coat, to float
through the whole cathedral, until
it reached the baptismal font
where it hovered for a long time before it came to rest
at the center of the sacred water, like a test.
And then
through my weird tears
a clear vision
at the center of the others:
My father
and the way for decades he drank his beer
beneath one bare bulb in a basement, like
a man desperately struggling to drown
a pale deer slowly in a shallow pond.
Riddle
The bodies of the girls in their beds, on their bikes, riding their horses through the clover, watching Snow White, sprawled on the rug chewing gum, reading Laura Ingalls Wilder—and, all the time, the chemical messages, the disseminated enzymes, the man in a tuxedo holding the door open wide, making that sweeping gesture with his arm.
Oh, biochemical seducers, hormonal wash, the external thyroid of a tadpole turning it irreversibly, involuntarily, into a frog.
They told us it was a dance, a party, a pageant, so we ran laughing together straight into the disaster. A pack of hounds dozed in the grass. Down the stairs, we ran, still wearing those glittering tiaras in our hair. Scaled Hadrian’s Wall in our high heels. The hounds snapped their teeth in a dream. The gee
se overhead flew in formation, obeying the vague whisperings in their bird brains explaining to them the ridiculously complex rules of their own migrations.
While our mothers stood helplessly by and screamed,
and the farmers plowed their ancient fields,
and our fathers watched us from the front
porch
tapping their chins and wondering—
who were we?
Confession
Like an animal cut in half
Like its stomach full of stones
Like light pouring off of an accident—more light, and more
Like a shadow in a threshold
Like a document at the end of a corridor
Like human beings in pastures grazing
Like mourners, like horses
Like official violence
Torture
Like the hospital room of the child after the parents have left
Like facing your prom dress in your nakedness
Like facing Oblivion in your prom dress
Like black coffee spilled on the lilies
Like milk splashed onto the ashes
Here I come: The man dragging something
The thing he drags: Here I am
You
If you kept walking you would, eventually, step out of this blizzard. You would walk to the place where even a blizzard reaches its limits. The ragged edge of its sum total. The place it stops and says, No more.
And the sky, suddenly, would be, above you, unabashedly blue.
But here, the flakes still fall in their slow motion, wearing their geometries like trances. Perhaps no two are exactly alike, but they are also too alike to be given names, too much the same to be granted lives. They fall in crowds in the world as well as in the mind.
But you were beautiful, too, and free of illusions, so why—?
Well, I keep forgetting. You never listened to my suggestions. Never asked for my advice. When I built my luminous prison around you, you simply lay down at the center of it and died.
Abigor
He is the demon who knows all the secrets of war:
How a leader wins
the love of his soldiers.
He is also the puppet discarded on the floor.
And the dying dog
panting with the sound
of an empty basket
in the back yard.
He’s the veranda on which the champagne kept flowing.
And the cool shade in which the witnesses
were tortured
until each one managed to tell a more
fantastic tale than the one before.
And the chiming of little birds
in the grass
just after—
And the guests gathered around the—
pretending to laugh.
And also the desperate
shrieks of the mink
caught in a trap
down by the creek
still with the swan’s blood fresh on its teeth—
that unbearable song about the memory of that pleasure.
Forgiveness
Mercy, like the carcasses of animals in a foyer, being burned.
Fragrant, dreaming, unreal, and having to do, terribly, with love.
The sun shining dumbly all over this world and its troubles. The self on tiptoes sneaking away from the self. In the passing lane today, a woman with her mouth open behind the wheel of her car. Singing, or swearing, wearing a coat, driving through her life, and mine.
Hello, little lifeboat made of straw. Hello, floating multitude of my sins in a basket called Forgiveness on an ocean the name of which my son once mispronounced the Specific.
Hello, ugly memory of myself crouched down with my fists on my thighs yelling at that child:
Something about a stuffed animal and we’re already late, and the palsied trees of winter behind me reflected for thousands of miles in his eyes.
Pain pill
Today as the beauties slice across the frozen
lake in their bright skates, all
daggerish light in the distance, just
between swallowing
and sleeping, I’ll—
One eye open in a grave.
One star over Bethlehem howling
over all the other stars.
Or the gray
spider sewing some old notion of herself between
the shade and the pane. The way
the memory of pain becomes
just that pale foam
left on the shore by the receding wave
or any of the other leftovers
of those Great Things
that meant you were alive
for a little while, and which
to love
would be too much, and to hate
would never be enough.
Now the skaters
are falling into dusk
one by one, as into wounds. Or
they skate on, but I can’t see them. How, drunk, once
I stood in front
of my own door
unable to open it, until
finally I thought
(such deep thoughts)
Who’s to say whether or not
I’m holding the wrong
key, or jamming
the right key
into someone else’s lock?
That water that swallows us:
There is a heart
pumping at the center of it. So much
submerged thunder.
Or a match burning
between the pages of a book. Or a dove
with a pellet in its side, still
flying, still
wearing
its feathered self around it, but
of flight
as it flies.
Almost there
The snail crossing the freeway in a rainstorm. A map might have helped. A more beautiful face. More life experience. Expensive perfume. A horse.
Given fewer options, and a grid. If not for uncertainty, the ancient Greeks, the ridiculous cheerfulness of sunflowers, the drifting immemorial ashes of the blueprints, the soup grown cold, the aunts gathered around the fiery cake, chanting, Make a wish! Make a wish!
The statistical index. The genetic predisposition. If. If. If.
Sing it all day long. Without it there is nothing but this code of lies, and the traffic of too much music in the mind. If is the diamond at the center of every life. The shining woman opening the window out of which her toddler will fall on a bright-white day in July:
Dad on a ladder outside.
Sister blabbing on the phone.
Not a cloud in the sky.
Not one thing wrong.
Almost there.
It is their song.
The Pleasure Center
It was tucked for us into the hypothalamus. Thank you, our lopped-off heads rolling all around the earth. Thank you, radio, movies, booze.
And thank you, too, racquetball court, video game, throbbing bass in the car at the stoplight as it pulls up next to ours.
Little fragment of a magnet.
Shrapnel in the attic.
Child on a bike.
Old woman on her knees beneath a suffering Jesus.
ADULT SUPERSTORE NEXT EXIT!
All of it crammed into a thing the size of a tadpole’s eye.
That terrifying tininess. Thrilling, flickering, wet. Space and Time writhing
around in a bit of slippery shining. God decided to stick that in our minds.
And even the miniature golf course on fire.
The fatal dune buggy ride.
The smell of some teenage girl’s menthol cigarette.
The whole amusement park, and the cotton candy—that
pink and painful sweetness beside you on the seat of some rollercoaster’s silhouette
in the pinwheeling sun as it sets.
We were perfect
test subjects for this.
As God is my witness:
I woke one morning when I was seven to find
the most unhappy man I’ve ever known
laughing in his pajamas. “What
are you laughing about?” I asked him,
and he said, “I don’t know.”
Lunch
has vanished. Just
a few crumbs on a plate, and the subway rumbling under us. It was
the Last Lunch. A bunch of us. We
would never be together in this life again.
A vein. A noose. A summer day. A rat crouching low
on the clattering tracks.
A storm. A scarf. A secret game. A man in the massive shadows
of the columns
of the Museum of Griefs-to-Come. A man
who would forever remain
our Observer, our Stranger
smirking in the corner of the photo behind our smug, shining faces.
Trees in fog
These trees in fog, not stirring, not calling:
How insistent they are
that they’ve been here all along
holding their tangible emptiness in their arms.
I admit it, I was wrong.
Here I stand, admitting it.
Like the mistress of the rich man
no longer in love
swallowing the pearls he gave her
one by one:
I was wrong.
But how I walked it—tenacity, my little dog—so
far and for so long. Walked
my wrongness all over the world.
Dressed it up.
Showed it off.
But that’s all over now.
Now, I am a woman who realizes she was wrong.
And how wrong.
Now, I am a woman who would—
No.
Just throw me a veil.
Like them, I will bear it on the landscape.