down to the library, solo through the empty
powerful halls, flash my pass
and stroll over to the dictionary
to look up the most interesting word
I knew, spank, dipping two fingers
into the jar of library paste to
suck that tart mucilage as I
came to the page with the cocker spaniel’s
silks curling up like the fine steam of the body.
After spank, and breast, I’d move on
to Abe Lincoln and Helen Keller,
safe in their goodness till the bell, thanks
to Mrs. Krikorian, amiable giantess
with the kind eyes. When she asked me to write
a play, and direct it, and it was a flop, and I
hid in the coat-closet, she brought me a candy-cane
as you lay a peppermint on the tongue, and the worm
will come up out of the bowel to get it.
And so I was emptied of Lucifer
and filled with school glue and eros and
Amelia Earhart, saved by Mrs. Krikorian.
And who had saved Mrs. Krikorian?
When the Turks came across Armenia, who
slid her into the belly of a quilt, who
locked her in a chest, who mailed her to America?
And that one, who saved her, and that one—
who saved her, to save the one
who saved Mrs. Krikorian, who was
standing there on the sill of 6th grade, a
wide-hipped angel, smokey hair
standing up weightless all around her head?
I end up owing my soul to so many,
to the Armenian nation, one more soul someone
jammed behind a stove, drove
deep into a crack in a wall,
shoved under a bed. I would wake
up, in the morning, under my bed—not
knowing how I had got there—and lie
in the dusk, the dustballs beside my face
round and ashen, shining slightly
with the eerie comfort of what is neither good nor evil.
First
He stood in the sulphur baths, his calves
against the stone rim of the pool
where his half-full glass of scotch stood, his
shins wavering in the water, his torso
looming over me, huge, in the night,
a grown-up man’s body, softer and
warmer with the clothes off—I was a sophomore
at college, in the baths with a naked man,
a writer, married, a father, widowed,
remarried, separated, unreadable, and when I
said No, I was sorry, I couldn’t,
he’d invented this, rising and dripping
in the heavy sodium water, giving me
his body to suck. I had not heard
of this, I was moved by his innocence and daring,
I went to him like a baby who’s been crying
for hours for milk. He stood and moaned
and rocked his knees, I felt I knew
what his body wanted me to do, like rubbing
my mother’s back, receiving directions
from her want into the nerves of my hands.
In the smell of the trees of seaweed rooted in
ocean trenches just offshore,
and the mineral liquid from inside the mountain,
I gave over to flesh like church music
until he drew out and held himself and
something flew past me like a fresh ghost.
We sank into the water and lay there, napes
on the rim. I’ve never done that before,
I said. His eyes not visible
to me, his voice muffled, he said, You’ve been
sucking cock since you were fourteen,
and fell asleep. I stayed beside him
so he wouldn’t go under, he snored like my father, I
tried not to think about what he had said,
but then I saw, in it, the unmeant
gift—that I was good at this
raw mystery I liked. I sat
and rocked, by myself, in the fog, in the smell
of kelp, night steam like animals’ breath,
there where the harsh granite and quartz dropped down
into and under the start of the western sea.
Adolescence
When I think of my adolescence, I think
of the bathroom of that seedy hotel
in San Francisco, where my boyfriend would take me.
I had never seen a bathroom like that—
no curtains, no towels, no mirror, just
a sink green with grime and a toilet
yellow and rust-colored—like something in a science experiment,
growing the plague in bowls.
Sex was still a crime, then,
I’d sign out of my college dorm
to a false destination, sign into
the flophouse under a false name,
go down the hall to the one bathroom
and lock myself in. And I could not learn to get that
diaphragm in, I’d decorate it
like a cake, with glistening spermicide,
and lean over, and it would leap from my fingers
and sail, into a corner, to land
in a concave depression like a rat’s nest,
I’d bend and pluck it out and wash it
and wash it down to that fragile dome,
I’d frost it again till it was shimmering
and bend it into its tensile arc and it would
fly through the air, rim humming
like Saturn’s ring, I would bow down and crawl to retrieve it.
When I think of being eighteen,
that’s what I see, that brimmed disc
floating through the air and descending, I see myself
kneeling and reaching, reaching for my own life.
May 1968
When the Dean said we could not cross campus
until the students gave up the buildings,
we lay down in the street,
we said the cops will enter this gate
over us. Lying back on the cobbles,
I saw the buildings of New York City
from dirt level, they soared up
and stopped, chopped off—above them, the sky,
the night air, over the island.
The mounted police moved, near us,
while we sang, and then I began to count,
12, 13, 14, 15
I counted again, 15, 16, one
month since the day on that deserted beach,
17, 18, my mouth fell open,
my hair on the street,
if my period did not come tonight
I was pregnant. I could see the sole of a cop’s
shoe, the gelding’s belly, its genitals—
if they took me to Women’s Detention and did
the exam on me, the speculum,
the fingers—I gazed into the horse’s tail
like a comet-train. I’d been thinking I might
get arrested, I had been half wanting
to give myself away. On the tar—
one brain in my head, another
in the making, near the base of my tail—
I looked at the steel arc of the horse’s
shoe, the curve of its belly, the cop’s
nightstick, the buildings streaming up
away from the earth. I knew I should get up
and leave, but I lay there looking at the space
above us, until it turned deep blue and then
ashy, colorless, Give me this one
night, I thought, and I’ll give this child
the rest of my life, the horses’ heads,
this time, drooping, dipping, until
they slept in a circle around my body and my daughter.
Bathing the New Born
I love with an almost fearful love
to remember the first baths I gave him,
our second child, so I knew what to do,
I laid the little torso along
my left forearm, nape of the neck
in the crook of my elbow, hips nearly as
small as a least tern’s tail
against my wrist, thigh held loosely
in the loop of thumb and forefinger, the
sign that means exactly right. I’d soap him,
the violet, cold feet, the scrotum
wrinkled as a waved whelk, the chest,
hands, clavicles, throat, gummy
furze of the scalp. When I got him too soapy he’d
slide in my grip like an armful of buttered
noodles, but I’d hold him not too tight,
I felt that I was good for him,
I’d tell him about his wonderful body
and the wonderful soap, and he’d look up at me,
one week old, his eyes still wide
and apprehensive. I love that time
when you croon and croon to them, you can see
the calm slowly entering them, you can
sense it in your clasping hand,
the loose spine relaxing against
the muscle of your forearm, you feel the fear
leaving their bodies, he lay in the blue
oval plastic baby tub and
looked at me in wonder and began to
move his silky limbs at will in the water.
41, Alone, No Gerbil
In the strange quiet, I realize
there’s no one else in the house. No bucktooth
mouth pulls at a stainless-steel teat, no
hairy mammal runs on a treadmill—
Charlie is dead, the last of our children’s half-children.
When our daughter found him lying in the shavings, trans-
mogrified backwards from a living body
into a bolt of rodent bread
she turned her back on early motherhood
and went on single, with nothing. Crackers,
Fluffy, Pretzel, Biscuit, Charlie,
buried on the old farm we bought
where she could know nature. Well, now she knows it
and it sucks. Creatures she loved, mobile and
needy, have gone down stiff and indifferent,
she will not adopt again though she cannot
have children yet, her body is like
a blueprint for a woman’s body,
so now everything stops, for a while,
now I must wait many years
to hear in this house again the faint
powerful call of a young animal.
Physics
Her first puzzle had three pieces,
she’d take the last piece, and turn it,
and lower it in, like a sewer-lid,
flush with the street. The bases of the frames were like
wooden fur, guard-hairs sticking out
of the pelt. I’d set one on the floor and spread
the pieces out around it. It makes me
groan to think of Red Riding Hood’s hood,
a single, scarlet, pointed piece, how
long since I have seen her. Later, panthers,
500 pieces, and an Annunciation,
1000 pieces, we would gaze, on our elbows,
into its gaps. Now she tells me
that if I were sitting in a twenty-foot barn,
with the doors open at either end,
and a fifty-foot ladder hurtled through the barn
at the speed of light, there would be a moment
—after the last rung was inside the barn
and before the first rung came out the other end—
when the whole fifty-foot ladder would be
inside the twenty-foot barn, and I believe her,
I have thought her life was inside my life
like that. When she reads the college catalogues, I
look away and hum. I have not grown
up yet, I have lived as my daughter’s mother
the way I had lived as my mother’s daughter,
inside her life. I have not been born yet.
My Son the Man
Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,
the way Houdini would expand his body
while people were putting him in chains. It seems
no time since I would help him put on his sleeper,
guide his calves into the shadowy interior,
zip him up and toss him up and
catch his weight. I cannot imagine him
no longer a child, and I know I must get ready,
get over my fear of men now my son
is going to be one. This was not
what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a
sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson,
snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains,
appeared in my arms. Now he looks at me
the way Houdini studied a box
to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.
First Formal
She rises up above the strapless, her dewy
flesh like a soul half out of a body.
It makes me remember her one week old,
mollescent, elegant, startled, alone.
She stands quite still, as if, if she moved,
her body might pour up out of the bodice,
she keeps her steady gaze raised
when she walks, she looks exactly forward,
led by some radar of the strapless, or with
a cup runneth over held perfectly level, her
almost seasick beauty shimmering
a little. She looks brave, shoulders
made of some extra-visible element,
or as if some of her cells, tonight,
were faceted like a fly’s eye, and her
hatched this moment, and yet weary—she would lie
in her crib, so slight, worn out from her journey,
and gaze at the world and at us in dubious willingness.
High School Senior
For seventeen years, her breath in the house
at night, puff, puff, like summer
cumulus above her bed,
and her scalp smelling of apricots
—this being who had formed within me,
squatted like a wide-eyed tree-frog in the night,
like an eohippus she had come out of history
slowly, through me, into the daylight,
I had the daily sight of her,
like food or air she was there, like a mother.
I say “college,” but I feel as if I cannot tell
the difference between her leaving for college
and our parting forever—I try to see
this apartment without her, without her pure
depth of feeling, without her creek-brown
hair, her daedal hands with their tapered
fingers, her pupils brown as the mourning cloak’s
wing, but I can’t. Seventeen years
ago, in this room, she moved inside me,
I looked at the river, I could not imagine
my life with her. I gazed across the street,
and saw, in the icy winter sun,
a column of steam rush up away from the earth.
There are creatures whose children float away
at birth, and those who throat-feed their young for
weeks and never see them again. My daughter
is free and she is in me—no, my love
of her is in me, moving in my heart,
changing chambers, like something poured
from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.
The Pediatrician Retires
This is the archway where I stood, next to the
panel of frosted glass, when
they told me
there was a chance it could be epilepsy, and
almost before my heart sank
I felt a new-made layer of something fold
over my will and wrap it, in an instant,
as if the body takes care of the parent
who takes care of the child. This is the door
we came through each week while the symptoms slowly
faded. That is the fruit-scale where she had
weighed him, and his arms had flown to the sides
in an infant Moro. And there are the chairs
where one sits with the infectious ones,
the three-year-olds calmly struggling for air, not
listless or scared, steady workers,
pulling breath through the constricted passage,
Yes, she says, it’s bronchial pneumonia
and asthma, the same as last month, the parent’s
heart suddenly stronger, like a muscle
the weight-lifter has worked. There is the room
where she took his blood and he watched the vial fill, he went
greener, and greener, and fainted, and she said,
Next time don’t be brave, next time
shout! And here is the chair where I sat and she
said If the nerve is dead, he will lose only
partial use of the hand, and it’s
the left hand—he’s right-handed, isn’t he?,
the girding, the triple binding of the heart.
This is the room where I sat, worried,
and opened the magazine, and saw
the war in Asia, a very young soldier
hanged by the neck—still a boy, almost,
not much older than the oldest children
in the waiting room. Suddenly its walls seemed
not quite real, as if we all
were in some large place together.
This is where I learned what I know,
the body university—
at graduation, we would cry, and throw
our ceiling-at-four-a.m. hats high in the air,
but I think that until the end of our life we are here.
This Hour
We could never really say what it is like,
this hour of drinking wine together
on a hot summer night, in the living room
with the windows open, in our underwear,
my pants with pale-gold gibbon monkeys on them
gleaming in the heat. We talk about our son disappearing
between the pine boughs,
we could not tell what was chrysalis or
bough and what was him. The wine