all the saxophones began to play
hot riffs of scat for the return of their rightful owners.
First Sex
(for J.)
I knew little, and what I knew
I did not believe—they had lied to me
so many times, so I just took it as it
came, his naked body on the sheet,
the tiny hairs curling on his legs like
fine, gold shells, his sex
harder and harder under my palm
and yet not hard as a rock his face cocked
back as if in terror, the sweat
jumping out of his pores like sudden
trails from the tiny snails when his knees
locked with little clicks and under my
hand he gathered and shook and the actual
flood like milk came out of his body, I
saw it glow on his belly, all they had
said and more, I rubbed it into my
hands like lotion, I signed on for the duration.
First Love
It was Sunday morning, I had The New York
Times spread out on my dormitory floor, its
black print coming off dark silver on the
heels of my palms, it was spring and I had the
dormer window of my room open, to
let it in, I even had the radio
on, I was letting it all in, the
tiny silvery radio voices—I
even let myself feel that it was Easter, the
dark flower of his life opening
again, his life being given back
again, I was in love and I could take it, the ink
staining my hands, the news on the radio
coming in my ears, there had been a wreck
and they said your name, son of the well-known they
said your name. Then they said where they’d
taken the wounded and the dead, and I called the
hospital, I remember kneeling by the
phone on the third-floor landing of the dorm, the
dark, steep, stairs down
next to me, I spoke to a young
man a young doctor there in the
Emergency Room, my open ear
pressed to the dark receiver, my open
life pressed to the world, I said
Which one of them died, and he said your name,
he was standing there in the room with you
saying your name.
I remember I leaned my
forehead against the varnished bars of the
baluster rails and held on,
pulling at the rails as if I wanted to
pull them together, shut them like a dark
door, close myself like a door
as you had been shut, closed off, but I could not
do it, the pain kept coursing through me like
life, like the gift of life.
Cambridge Elegy
(for Henry Averell Gerry, 1941–60)
I scarcely know how to speak to you now,
you are so young now, closer to my daughter’s age
than mine—but I have been there and seen it, and must
tell you, as the seeing and hearing
spell the world into the deaf-mute’s hand.
The dormer windows like the ears of a fox, like the
double row of teats on a pig, still
perk up over the Square, though they’re digging up the
street now, as if digging a grave,
the shovels shrieking on stone like your car
sliding on its roof after the crash.
How I wanted everyone to die if you had to die,
how sealed into my own world I was,
deaf and blind. What can I tell you now,
now that I know so much and you are a
freshman still, drinking a quart of orange juice and
playing three sets of tennis to cure a hangover, such an
ardent student of the grown-ups! I can tell you
we were right, our bodies were right, life was
really going to be that good, that
pleasurable in every cell.
Suddenly I remember the exact look of your body, but
better than the bright corners of your eyes, or the
light of your face, the rich Long Island
puppy-fat of your thighs, or the slick
chino of your pants bright in the corners of my eyes, I
remember your extraordinary act of courage in
loving me, something no one but the
fearless, you could drive after a sleepless night
just like a grown-up, and not be afraid, you could
fall asleep at the wheel easily and
never know it, each blond hair of your head—and they were
thickly laid—put out like a filament of light,
twenty years ago. The Charles still
slides by with that ease that made me bitter when I
wanted all things hard as your death was hard;
wanted all things broken and rigid as the
bricks in the sidewalk or your love for me
stopped cell by cell in your young body.
Ave—I went ahead and had the children,
the life of ease and faithfulness, the
palm and the breast, every millimeter of delight in the body,
I took the road we stood on at the start together, I
took it all without you as if
in taking it after all I could most
honor you.
Still Life
I lie on my back after making love,
breasts in shallow curves like the lids of soup dishes,
nipples shiny as berries, speckled and immutable.
My legs lie down there somewhere in the bed like those
great silver fish drooping over the edge of the table.
Scene of destruction, scene of perfect peace,
sex bright and calm and luminous as the
scarlet and blue dead pheasant all
maroon neck feathers and deep body wounds,
and on the center of my forehead a drop of water
round and opalescent, and in it
your self-portrait—the artist, upside down,
naked, holding your brushes dripping like torches with light.
Greed and Aggression
Someone in Quaker meeting talks about greed and aggression
and I think of the way I lay the massive
weight of my body down on you
like a tiger lying down in gluttony and pleasure on the
elegant heavy body of the eland it eats,
the spiral horn pointing to the sky like heaven.
Ecstasy has been given to the tiger,
forced into its nature the way the
forcemeat is cranked down the throat of the held goose,
it cannot help it, hunger and the glory of
eating packed at the center of each
tiger cell, for the life of the tiger and the
making of new tigers, so there will
always be tigers on the earth, their stripes like
stripes of night and stripes of fire-light—
so if they had a God it would be striped,
burnt-gold and black, the way if
I had a God it would renew itself the
way you live and live while I take you as if
consuming you while you take me as if
consuming me, it would be a God of
love as complete satiety,
greed and fullness, aggression and fullness, the
way we once drank at the body of an animal
until we were so happy we could only
faint, our mouths running, into sleep.
It
Sometimes we fit together like the creamy
speckled three-section body of the banana, that
joke fruit, as sex was a joke when we were kids,
and sometimes it is like a jagged blue comb of glass across
my skin,
and sometimes you have me bent over as thick paper can be
folded, on the rug in the center of the room
far from the soft bed, my knuckles
pressed against the grit in the grain of the rug’s
braiding where they
laid the rags tight and sewed them together,
my ass in the air like a lily with a wound on it
and I feel you going down into me as
if my own tongue is your cock sticking
out of my mouth like a stamen, the making and
breaking of the world at the same moment,
and sometimes it is sweet as the children we had
thought were dead being brought to the shore in the
narrow boats, boatload after boatload.
Always I am stunned to remember it,
as if I have been to Saturn or the bottom of a trench in the
sea floor, I
sit on my bed the next day with my mouth open and think of it.
Topography
After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
intricately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from your left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
A Woman in Heat Wiping Herself
High in the inner regions of my body
this gloss is spun, high up
under the overhanging ledge where the
light pours down on the cliff night and day.
No workers stand around in the
camaraderie of workers,
no one lays the color down on the
lip of the braid, there is only the light,
bands and folds of light, and the clean
sand at the edge, the working surface—there is
no one around for miles, no one hungry,
no one being fed. Just as in the side of the
lamb no one is tending the hole where the
light pours out, no one is folding or
carding while the gold grease of the floss
flows through the follicle, beading and rippling back and
curving forward in solemn spillage.
Things done with no reference to the human.
Most things are done with no reference to the human
even if they happen inside us, in our
body that is far beyond our powers, that we could
never invent. Deep in my sex, the
glittering threads are thrown outward and thrown outward
the way the sea lifts up the whole edge of its body,
the rim, the slit where once or twice in a lifetime
you can look through and see the other world—
it is this world, without us,
this earth and our bodies
without us watching.
The Premonition
When we got to the island, I would drive the kids
over to the Community Center,
its parking lot seething with children, a
spawn of faces in the rear-view mirror,
tops of heads just visible
over the trunk of the car.
I was so afraid I’d run over a child
I had to park somewhere else, I
felt the car straining forward,
lunging like a hungry shark.
I could see the still arms, the scarlet
herringbone pattern across a chest, the
head cracked like a smooth brown egg—I
saw it so clearly I thought it was a warning, I went
slower and slower, wild to be careful,
feeling safe only at home,
in bed, your body an ivory tower
inside my body, and then the condom
ripped and the seed tore into me like a
flame tearing out the top of a tower
into the night, you said you didn’t
want another child at all,
and then I knew who it was, the one in the
center of the pool of blood, the dark
marks of the tread all over its chest where the
car had been driven over it back and forth, back and forth.
I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror
Backwards and upside down in the twilight, that
woman on all fours, her head
dangling and suffused, her lean
haunches, the area of darkness, the flanks and
ass narrow and pale as a deer’s and those
breasts hanging down toward the center of the earth like plummets, when I
swayed from side to side they swayed, it was
so near night I couldn’t tell if they were yellow or
violet or rose. I cannot get over her
moving toward him upside down in the mirror like a
fly on the ceiling, her head hanging down and her
tongue long and purple as an anteater’s
going toward his body, she was clearly a human
animal, like an Iroquois scout creeping
naked and noiseless, and when I looked at her
she looked at me so directly, her eyes all
pupil, her stare said to me I
belong here, this is mine, I am living out my
true life on this earth.
Love in Blood Time
When I saw my blood on your leg, the drops so
dark and clear, that real arterial red,
I could not even think about death, you
stood there smiling at me,
you squatted in the tub on your long haunches
and washed it away.
The large hard bud of your glans in my mouth,
the dark petals of my sex in your mouth,
I could feel death going farther and farther away,
forgetting me, losing my address, his
palm forgetting the curve of my cheek in his hand.
Then when we lay in the small glow of the
lamp and I saw your lower lip
glazed with light like liquid fire
I looked at you and I tell you I knew you were God
and I was God and we lay in our bed
on the dark cloud, and somewhere down there
was the earth, and somehow all we did, the
blood, the pink stippling of the head, the
pearl fluid out of the slit, the
goodness of all we did would somehow get
down there, it would find its flowering in the world.
This
Maybe if I did not have this
I would call myself my mother’s daughter
or identify my soul with the blue bowl
that stood on the table, or with the gold wall, or the field.
I would call myself Cobb, Stuart, Torrance,
McLean, I would wear the plaid at all times,
clan green, blood red,
fine line of the purple vein,
if I did not have this. Or I would wrap my life in th
e
flag, in its wide swaths of blood, its
stars like broken bowls on that table,
or the cupped curve of my father’s cereal-bowl forehead
here above my brows, or my mother’s bad vein
running up the inside of my leg
like a river under the land.
But I have this,
so this is who I am, this body
white as yellowish dough brushed with dry flour
pressed to his body. I am these breasts that
crush against him like collapsible silver
travel cups that telescope into themselves,
and the nipples that float in the center like hard
raspberries in bright sunlight, they
are my life, the dark sex that
takes him in as anyone in summer will
open their throat to the hose held up
hot on the edge of the sandlot—don’t
ask me about my country or who my
father was or even what I do, if you
want to know who I am, I am this, this.
IV
The Moment the Two Worlds Meet
That’s the moment I always think of—when the
slick, whole body comes out of me,
when they pull it out, not pull it but steady it
as it pushes forth, not catch it but keep their
hands under it as it pulses out,
they are the first to touch it,
and it shines, it glistens with the thick liquid on it.
That’s the moment, while it’s sliding, the limbs
compressed close to the body, the arms
bent like a crab’s cloud-muscle legs, the
thighs packed plums in heavy syrup, the
legs folded like the wings of a chicken—
that is the center of life, that moment when the
juiced bluish sphere of the baby is
sliding between the two worlds,
wet, like sex, it is sex,
it is my life opening back and back
as you’d strip the reed from the bud, not strip it but
watch it thrust so it peels itself and the
flower is there, severely folded, and
then it begins to open and dry
but by then the moment is over,
they wipe off the grease and wrap the child in a blanket and
hand it to you entirely in this world.