evening light, we did not turn back,
we stayed with it, even though we were
far beyond what we knew, we rose
into the grain of the cloud, even though we were
frightened, the air hollow, even though
nothing grew there, even though it is a
place from which no one has ever come back.
III. The Children
Exclusive
(for my daughter)
I lie on the beach, watching you
as you lie on the beach, memorizing you
against the time when you will not be with me:
your empurpled lips, swollen in the sun
and smooth as the inner lips of a shell;
your biscuit-gold skin, glazed and
faintly pitted, like the surface of a biscuit;
the serious knotted twine of your hair.
I have loved you instead of anyone else,
loved you as a way of loving no one else,
every separate grain of your body
building the god, as I built you within me,
a sealed world. What if from your lips
I had learned the love of other lips,
from your starred, gummed lashes the love of
other lashes, from your shut, quivering
eyes the love of other eyes,
from your body the bodies,
from your life the lives?
Today I see it is there to be learned from you:
to love what I do not own.
Six-Year-Old Boy
We get to the country late at night
in late May, the darkness is warm and
smells of half-opened lilac.
Our son is asleep on the back seat,
his wiry limbs limp and supple
except where his hard-on lifts his pajamas like the
earth above the shoot of a bulb.
I say his name, he opens one eye and it
rolls back to the starry white.
I tell him he can do last pee
on the grass, and he smiles on the surface of sleep like
light on the surface of water.
He pulls his pajamas down and there it
is, gleaming like lilac in the dark,
hard as a heavy-duty canvas fire-hose
shooting its steel stream.
He leans back, his pale face
blissful. The piss, lacy and fragile,
arcs over the black lawn.
Afterwards, no hands,
he shakes himself dry, cock tossing like a
horse’s white neck, and then he
leans against the car, grinning,
eyes closed, sound asleep,
his sex pointing straight ahead,
leading him
as if by the nose
into his life, late May,
June, late June, July,
full summer.
Eggs
My daughter has turned against eggs. Age six
to nine, she cooked them herself, getting up
at six to crack the shells, slide the
three yolks into the bowl,
slit them with the whisk, beat them till they hissed
and watch the pan like an incubator as they
firmed, gold. Lately she’s gone from
three to two to one and now she
cries she wants to quit eggs.
It gets on her hands, it’s slimy, and it’s hard
to get all the little things out:
puddles of gluten glisten on the counter
with small, curled shapes floating in their
sexual smear. She moans. It is getting
too close. Next birthday she’s ten and then
it’s open season, no telling when
the bright, crimson dot appears
like the sign on a fertilized yolk. She has carried
all her eggs in the two baskets
woven into her fine side,
but soon they’ll be slipping down gently,
sliding. She grips the counter where the raw
whites jump, and the spiral shapes
signal from the glittering gelatine, and she
wails for her life.
Size and Sheer Will
The fine, green pajama cotton,
washed so often it is paper-thin and
iridescent, has split like a sheath
and the glossy white naked bulbs of
our son’s toes thrust forth like crocus
this early Spring. The boy is growing
as fast as he can, elongated
wrists dangling, lean meat
showing between the shirt and the belt.
If there were a rack to stretch himself, he would
strap his slight body to it.
If there were a machine to enter,
skip the next ten years and be
sixteen immediately, this boy would
do it. All day long he cranes his
neck, like a plant in the dark with a single
light above it, or a sailor under
tons of green water, longing
for the surface, for his rightful life.
For My Daughter
That night will come. Somewhere someone will be
entering you, his body riding
under your white body, dividing
your blood from your skin, your dark, liquid
eyes open or closed, the slipping
silken hair of your head fine
as water poured at night, the delicate
threads between your legs curled
like stitches broken. The center of your body
will tear open, as a woman will rip the
seam of her skirt so she can run. It will happen,
and when it happens I will be right here
in bed with your father, as when you learned to read
you would go off and read in your room
as I read in mine, versions of the story
that changes in the telling, the story of the river.
Rite of Passage
As the guests arrive at my son’s party
they gather in the living room—
short men, men in first grade
with smooth jaws and chins.
Hands in pockets, they stand around
jostling, jockeying for place, small fights
breaking out and calming. One says to another
How old are you? Six. I’m seven. So?
They eye each other, seeing themselves
tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their
throats a lot, a room of small bankers,
they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you
up, a seven says to a six,
the dark cake, round and heavy as a
turret, behind them on the table. My son,
freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,
chest narrow as the balsa keel of a
model boat, long hands
cool and thin as the day they guided him
out of me, speaks up as a host
for the sake of the group.
We could easily kill a two-year-old,
he says in his clear voice. The other
men agree, they clear their throats
like Generals, they relax and get down to
playing war, celebrating my son’s life.
Relinquishment
On a black night in early March,
the fire hot, my daughter says
Wrap me in something. I get the old
grey quilt, gleaming like a sloughed
insect casing, and wrap it around and
around her narrow nine-year-old body,
hollow and flexible. Cover my face,
she hisses in excitement. I cover her face
and fall back from the narrow, silver
shape on the carpet.
How finally
she is getting away—an Egyptian child
&n
bsp; bound in gauze, set in a boat
on a black night in early March
and pushed out on the water, given
over to the gods of the next world
who will find her
or not find her.
Son
Coming home from the women-only bar,
I go into my son’s room.
He sleeps—fine, freckled face
thrown back, the scarlet lining of his mouth
shadowy and fragrant, his small teeth
glowing dull and milky in the dark,
opal eyelids quivering
like insect wings, his hands closed
in the middle of the night.
Let there be enough
room for this life: the head, lips,
throat, wrists, hips, penis,
knees, feet. Let no part go
unpraised. Into any new world we enter, let us
take this man.
Pre-Adolescent in Spring
Through the glass door thin as a light freeze on the pond,
my girl calls me out.
beside her, sparkling and loosening.
The sun glints in her hair dark as the
packed floor of the pine forest,
its hot resin smell rising like a
smell of sex. She leaps off the porch and
runs on the grass, her buttocks like an unripe
apricot. She comes back, hair
smoking, face cool and liquid,
skin that vital, translucent white of the
casing of milk-weed pods. She fishes
another cube from the cup with her tongue.
Around us the flat spears of bulbs
are rising from inside the ground.
Above us the buds are opening. I hold
tight to this child beside me, and she
leans her body against me, heavy,
its layers still folded, its fragrance only
half unlocked, but the ice now rapidly
melting in her mouth.
Blue Son
All day with my blue son,
sick again, the blue skin
under his eyes, blue tracing of his
veins over the bones of his chest
pronounced as the ribs of the dead, a green
vein in his groin, blue-green as the
numbers on an arm. His eloquent face
grows thinner each hour, the germs use him
like a soap. Exhaustion strips him, and under each
layer of sweetness a deeper layer of
sweetness is bared. His white skin,
so fine it has no grain, goes blue-grey,
and the burning blue of his eye
dies down and goes out, it is the faded cobalt on the
side of a dead bird. He seems to
withdraw to a great distance, as if he is
gone and looking back at me
without regret, patient, like an old
man who has just dug his grave and
waits at the edge, in the evening light,
naked, blue with cold, in terrible
obedience.
Pajamas
My daughter’s pajamas lie on the floor
inside out, thin and wrinkled as
peeled skins of peaches when you ease the
whole skin off at once.
You can see where her waist emerged, and her legs,
her arms, and head, the fine material
gathered in rumples like skin the caterpillar
ramped out of and left to shrivel.
You can see, there at the center of the bottoms,
the raised cotton seam like the line
down the center of fruit, where the skin first splits
and curls back. You can almost see the hard
halves of her young buttocks, the precise
stem-mark of her sex. Her shed
skin shines at my feet, and in the air there is a
sharp fragrance like peach brandy—
the birth-room pungence of her released life.
The Killer
Whenever there’s a lull in the action, my son
sights along his invisible sights and
picks things off. He eyes a pillar
three rows over, pivots and easily
fires—a hit, you can tell by the flames and
smoke reflected in his glittering eyes.
Everything becomes a target—
cops topple, a whole populace
falls as he aims, yet I know this boy,
kind and tender. He whirls and lets them
have it. Tangents straighter than the arc of his
pee connect him to all he sees
like a way to touch: as the spider travels its
silver wires, our son goes out along his
line of fire, marking each thing
with the sign of his small ecstatic life.
The Sign of Saturn
Sometimes my daughter looks at me with an
amber black look, like my father
about to pass out from disgust, and I remember
she was born under the sign of Saturn,
the father who ate his children. Sometimes
the dark, silent back of her head
reminds me of him unconscious on the couch
every night, his face turned away.
Sometimes I hear her talking to her brother
with that coldness that passed for reason in him,
that anger hardened by will, and when she rages
into her room, and slams the door,
I can see his vast blank back
when he passed out to get away from us
and lay while the bourbon turned, in his brain,
to coal. Sometimes I see that coal
trying to persuade her toward the human, her little
clear face tilts as if she can
not hear me, as if she were listening
to the blood in her own ear, instead,
her grandfather’s voice.
Armor
Just about at the triple-barreled pistol
I can’t go on. I sink down
as if shot, beside the ball of its butt
larded with mother-of-pearl. My son
leaves me on the bench, and goes on. Hand on
hip, he gazes at a suit of armor,
blue eyes running over the silver,
looking for a slit. He shakes his head,
hair greenish as the gold velvet
cod-skirt nonindent before him in volutes
at a metal groin. Next, I see him
facing a case of shields, fingering
the sweater over his heart, and then
for a long time I don’t see him, as a mother will
lose her son in war. I sit
and think about men. Finally the boy
comes back, sated, so fattened with gore
his eyelids bulge. We exit under the
huge tumescent jousting irons,
their pennants a faded rose, like the mist
before his eyes. He slips his hand
lightly in mine, and says Not one of those
suits is really safe. But when we
get to the wide museum steps
railed with gold like the descent from heaven,
he can’t resist,
and before my eyes, down the stairs,
over and over, clutching his delicate
unprotected chest, my son
dies, and dies.
35/10
Brushing out my daughter’s dark
silken hair before the mirror
I see the grey gleaming on my head,
the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it
just as we begin to go
they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck
clarifying as the fine bones of her
&nbs
p; hips sharpen? As my skin shows
its dry pitting, she opens like a small
pale flower on the tip of a cactus;
as my last chances to bear a child
are falling through my body, the duds among them,
her full purse of eggs, round and
firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about
to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled
fragrant hair at bedtime. It’s an old
story—the oldest we have on our planet—
the story of replacement.
The Missing Boy
(for Etan Patz)
Every time we take the bus
my son sees the picture of the missing boy.
He looks at it like a mirror—the dark
blond hair, the pale skin,
the blue eyes, the electric-blue sneakers with
slashes of jagged gold. But of course that
kid is little, only six and a half,
an age when things can happen to you,
when you’re not really safe, and our son is seven,
practically fully grown—why, he would
tower over that kid if they could
find him and bring him right here on this bus and
stand them together. He sways in the silence
wishing for that, the tape on the picture
gleaming over his head, beginning to
melt at the center and curl at the edges as it
ages. At night, when I put him to bed,
my son holds my hand tight
and says he’s sure that kid’s all right,
nothing to worry about, he just
hopes he’s getting the food he likes,
not just any old food, but the food
he likes the most, the food he is used to.
Bread
When my daughter makes bread, a cloud of flour
hangs in the air like pollen. She sifts and
sifts again, the salt and sugar
close as the grain of her skin. She heats the
water to body temperature
with the sausage lard, fragrant as her scalp
the day before hair-wash, and works them together on a
floured board. Her broad palms
bend the paste toward her and the heel of her hand
presses it away, until the dough