and a silver hard hat that makes no sense.
The cows could not bombard his head,
though the Lilies and the Buttercups, the Jezebels and Mathildas,
avenged their lot in other ways
like kicking over a pail or stomping on his foot.
Blue welt, the small bones come unknitted,
the big toenail a black cicada peeling off its branch.
It wasn’t hard to understand their grudge, their harbor
of accumulated hurts —
imagine lugging those big tits everywhere, year after year.
Balloons full of wet concrete
hung between their legs like scrotums, duplicate and puffed.
I remember grappling with the nipples
like a teenage boy in a car’s backseat
and how the teats would always fill again before I could complete
their squeezing-out.
At night, two floors above them in the half-demolished barn,
my hands ached and made me dream of cows that drained
until the little stool rose off the ground and I found myself
dog-paddling in milk.
The summer after college I’d gone off to live with women
who’d forsworn straight jobs and underwear and men.
At night the ten of us linked hands
around a low wire-spool table before we took our meal of
vegetables and bread.
Afterward, from where the barn’s missing wall
opened out on Mad River, which had no banks but cut an oxbow
flush with the iridescent swale of the lower fields,
I saw women bathing, their flanks in the dim light
rising like mayflies born straight out of the river.
Everyone else was haying the lower field when he pulled up,
his van unmarked and streamlined like his wares:
vials of silvery jism from a bull named Festus
who — because he’d sired a Jersey that took first place
at the Vermont State Fair in ’53 —
was consigned to hurried couplings with an old maple stump
rigged up with white fur and a beaker.
When the man appeared I was mucking stalls in such heat
that I can’t imagine whether or not I would have worn
my shirt
or at what point it became clear to me that the bull Festus
had been dead for years.
I had this idea the world did not need men:
not that we would have to kill them personally,
but through our sustained negligence they would soon die off
like houseplants. When I pictured the afterlife
it was like an illustration in one of those Jehovah’s Witness magazines,
all of us, cows and women, marching on a promised land
colored that luminous green and disencumbered by breasts.
I slept in the barn on a pallet of fir limbs,
ate things I dug out of the woods,
planned to make love only with women, then changed my mind
when I realized how much they scared me.
“Inseminator man,” he announced himself, extending a hand,
though I can’t remember if we actually spoke.
We needed him to make the cows dry off and come into new milk:
we’d sell the boy-calves for veal, keep the females for milkers,
and Festus would live on, with this man for a handmaid,
whom I met as he was either going into the barn or coming out.
I know for a fact he didn’t trumpet his presence,
but came and went mysteriously
like the dove that bore the sperm of God to earth.
He wore a hard hat, introduced himself before I took him in,
and I remember how he graciously ignored my breasts while still
giving them wide berth.
Maybe I wore a shirt or maybe not: to say anything
about those days now sounds so strange.
We would kill off the boys, save the females for milkers I figured
as I led him to the halfway mucked-out stalls, where he
unfurled a glove past his elbow
like Ava Gardner in an old-movie nightclub scene.
Then greased the glove with something from a rusted can
before I left him in the privacy of barn light
with the rows of cows and the work of their next generation
while I went back outside to the shimmering and nearly
blinding work of mine.
Tripe
We were never a family given to tongue or brains.
So the cow’s stomach had to bear her last straws,
and the parched breasts of chickens, the ribs and legs
and steaks and fish and even the calf’s sour liver
had become testaments to the monotony of days.
Since then I have understood the rebellion hedged
in its bifurcated rind, its pallor, its refusal
to tear or shred when chawed on by first
the right then the left jaw’s teeth —
until finally the wad must be swallowed whole.
The tough meat meant life’s repertoire had shrunk
to a sack inside of which she was boxing shadows —
kids and laundry, yes, but every night the damned
insistence of dinner. And wasn’t the stomach
a master alchemist: grass and slops and the green dirt
transformed into other cuts of bloody, marbled beef.
Times when she wanted that same transformation
the house filled with its stewing, a ghastly sweet
that drove us underneath the beds. From there
we braved mushroom clouds rising off her electric range,
blowing the kitchen walls as wide as both Dakotas.
And I pictured her pale-faced & lustrous with steam
as she stood in that new open space, lifting
the hair off her neck as the stockpot billowed
its sugary haze like the sweat of a hired man.
At St. Placid’s
She wears a habit the unlikely blue color
of a swimming pool, the skin of her face
smooth where it shows beneath a wimple
from which one blond strand escapes.
While she squints at the sun, her hands
knit themselves in the folds of her skirts.
The man she’s speaking to, the monk,
is also young, his shoulders broad
from shooting baskets in the gym.
I have seen him running across the fields
in his nylon shorts, big muscles like roasts
sheathing the bones in his thighs.
They are standing on the monastery’s walkway
and I am at the window watching
this moment when their voices fall away,
nothing left but the sound of water dripping
off the trees, a fuchsia brooding in a basket
over her left shoulder. Silent now,
they are thinking. But not
about that. The fine weather, yes,
the church bells, the cross, an old woman
who used to come to Mass who’s dying.
All this they think of. But surely
not about that, no. Not that other thing.
The Roots of Pessimism in Model Rocketry, the Fallacy of Its Premise
X-Ray had a see-thru payload chamber.
The Flyer Saucer model was a gyp —
unless you were the kind of kid who loved
the balsa wood shredding more than flight time,
the smashing down more than the going up.
When Big Bertha sheared my brother’s pinkie
I watched medicine make its promise good:
in the future we would all be androids.
The doctors reinstalled his milky nail
and drained blue fingertip, though afterward
I felt a little cheated. Already
I’d envisioned how his mutant terrors
could be put to my use, the naked stub
unsheathed to jinx an enemy sneaker.
We were a tribe of Josef Mengeles
doing frontier science: putting crickets
in the payload, betting if they’d return
alive or dead. I always bet on death
because they always came down dead. I was
the pessimist, the child of many coins.
When someone fished from the dusty ballfield
the cocktail sausage of my brother’s loss,
I gave its odds less than even money.
My vote was: Put the finger in a can,
send it to Estes Model Rocket Co.
who would feel guilty enough to send cash.
But guilt turned on me. Now my brother’s hand
looks perfect, except when he makes a fist.
The Body Mutinies
outside St. Pete’s
When the doctor runs out of words and still
I won’t leave, he latches my shoulder and
steers me out doors. Where I see his blurred hand,
through the milk glass, flapping goodbye like a sail
(& me not griefstruck yet but still amazed: how
words and names — medicine’s blunt instruments—
undid me. And the seconds, the half seconds
it took for him to say those words). For now,
I’ll just stand in the courtyard, watching bodies
struggle in then out of one lean shadow
a tall fir lays across the wet flagstones.
Before the sun clears the valance of gray trees
and finds the surgical-supply shop’s window
and makes the dusty bedpans glint like coins.
Kilned
I was trying to somehow keep [my early pieces] true to their nature,
to allow the crudeness to be their beauty. Now I want the lava to
teach me what it does best.
STEPHEN LANG
These days when my legs twitch like hounds under the sheets
and the eyes are troubled by a drifting fleck —
I think of him: the artist
who climbs into the lava runs at Kalapana,
the only person who has not fled from town
fearing the advance of basalt tongues.
He wears no special boots, no special clothes,
no special breather mask to save him
from poison fumes. And it is hot, so hot
the sweat drenches him and shreds his clothes
as he bends to plunge his shovel
where the earth’s bile has found its way to surface.
When he catches fire, he’ll roll in a patch of moss
then simply rise and carry on. He will scoop
this pahoehoe, he will think of Pompeii
and the bodies torqued in final grotesque poses.
Locals cannot haul away their wooden churches fast enough,
they call this the wrath of Madame Pele,
the curse of a life that was so good
they should have known to meet it with suspicion.
But this man steps into the dawn and its yellow flames,
spins each iridescent blue clod in the air
before spreading it on a smooth rock ledge to study.
First he tries to see what this catastrophe is saying.
Then, with a trowel in his broiling hand,
he works to sculpt it into something human.
Women Who Sleep on Stones
Women who sleep on stones are like
brick houses that squat alone in cornfields.
They look weatherworn, solid, dusty,
torn screens sloughing from the window frames.
But at dusk a second-story light is always burning.
Used to be I loved nothing more
than spreading my blanket on high granite ledges
that collect good water in their hollows.
Stars came close without the trees
staring and rustling like damp underthings.
But doesn’t the body foil what it loves best?
Now my hips creak and their blades are tender.
I can’t rest on my back for fear of exposing
my gut to night creatures who might come along
and rip it open with a beak or hoof.
And if I sleep on my belly, pinning it down,
my breasts start puling like baby pigs
trapped under their slab of torpid mother.
Dark passes as I shift from side to side
to side, the blood pooling just above the bone.
Women who sleep on stones don’t sleep.
They see the stars moving, the sunrise, the gnats
rising like a hairnet lifted from a waitress’s head.
The next day they’re sore all over and glad
for the ache: that’s how stubborn they are.
Compulsory Travel
Not yet did we have personalities to interfere
with what we were: two sisters, two brothers.
Maybe our parents really were people who walked in the world,
were mean or kind, but you’d have to prove it to us.
They were the keepers of money, the signers of report cards,
the drivers of cars. We had a station wagon.
Back home we even had a dog, who was fed
by a neighbor kid while we toured the Jersey shore.
We waded in the motel pool and clung
to the edge of the deep end, because we couldn’t swim.
Maybe that’s why we never went in the ocean, despite
hours of driving. We could’ve just gone down the block!
Yet each year we made a ritual of this week
spent yelling and cursing and swatting each other,
with none of the analyses we now employ, the past
used as ammunition, the glosses from our latest therapist.
Back then a sock in the jaw could set anyone straight.
On Sunday afternoon, the homeward traffic would grind still
where the turnpike bottlenecked. My father
would slam his forehead against the steering wheel,
start changing lanes and leaning on the horn.
Without breeze through the window, the car would hold
our body heat like an iron skillet, skin peeling
from our burned shoulders as we hurled pretzels
and gave the finger to kids stopped in cars beside us.
My mother wouldn’t mention the turn we’d missed
a few miles back; instead she’d fold the map
and jam it resolutely in the glove box while we crept on.
Perhaps this was our finest hour, as the people
we were becoming took shape and began to emerge:
the honkers of horns and the givers of fingers.
After the sun turned red and disappeared, we rolled
through darkness, wondering if the world knew all its names:
Wickatunk, Colts Neck, Zarephath, Spotswood — in every town
there were houses, in every house there’s a light.
Limits
The dead man.
Every now and again, I see him.
And the wildlife refuge where I worked then,
the shallow ponds of Leslie Salt Company
patchworking the San Francisco Bay edges
and spreading below the hills like broken tiles,
each pond a different color — from blue to green
to yellow until finally the burnished red
of terra-cotta, as the water grew denser
and denser with salt. Dunlins blew upward
like paper scraps torn from a single sheet,
clouds of birds purling in
sunlight, harboring
the secret of escaped collision. And
that other mystery: how these weightless tufts
could make it halfway to Tierra del Fuego
and back before spring’s first good day.
On those good days, a group from the charity ward
named after the state’s last concession to saints
would trudge up the hill to the visitor center,
where I’d show them California shorebirds
— a stuffed egret, western sandpiper, and avocet —
whose feathers were matted and worn to shafts
from years of being stroked like puppies.
As I guided their hands over the pelts
questions stood on my tongue — mostly
about what led them to this peculiar life,
its days parceled into field trips
and visits to the library for picture books
with nurses whose enthusiasms were always greater
than their own. Their own had stalled out
before reaching the moist surface of their eyes,
some of the patients fitting pigeonholes built
in my head, like Down syndrome and hydrocephalus.
But others were not marked in any way,
and their defects cut closer to the bones
under my burnt-sienna ranger uniform.
Maybe I was foolish to believe in escape
from the future carried in their uncreased palms:
our lives overseen by the strict, big-breasted nurse
who is our health or our debts or even
our children, the her who is always putting crayons
and lumps of clay in our hands, insisting
we make our lives into some crude but useful thing.
And one day a man, a patient who must have been
supervised by his strict heart, fell down
suddenly and hard, on his way up the hill.
Two nurses prodded him on toward the building,