Poemunity — your poem community

In my grandmother’s house there was always chicken soup And talk of the old country—mud and boards, Poverty, The snow falling down the necks of lovers. Now and then, out of her savings She sent them a dowry. Imagine The rice-powdered faces! And the smell of the bride, like chicken soup. But the Germans killed them. I know it’s in bad taste to say it, But it’s true. The Germans killed them all. * In the ruins of Berchtesgaden A child with yellow hair Ran out of a doorway. A German girl-child— Cuckoo, all skin and bones— Not even enough to make chicken soup. She sat by the stream and smiled. Then as we splashed in the sun She laughed at us. We had killed her mechanical brothers, So we forgave her. * The sun is shining. The shadows of the lovers have disappeared. They are all eyes; they have some demand on me— They want me to be more serious than I want to be. They want me to stick in their mudhole Where no one is elegant. They want me to wear old clothes, They want me to be poor, to sleep in a room with many others— Not to walk in the painted sunshine To a summer house, But to live in the tragic world forever.

is not turning the way you thought it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop, the way a child draws the tail of a pig. What came out of your mouth, a riff of common talk. As a sudden weather shift on a beach, sky looming mountains of cloud in a way you cannot predict or guide, the story shuffles elements, darkens, takes its own side. And it is strange. Far more complicated than a few phrases pieced together around a kitchen table on a July morning in Dallas, say, a city you don’t live in, where people might shop forever or throw a thousand stories away. You who carried or told a tiny bit of it aren’t sure. Is this what we wanted? Stories wandering out, having their own free lives? Maybe they are planning something bad. A scrap or cell of talk you barely remember is growing into a weird body with many demands. One day soon it will stumble up the walk and knock, knock hard, and you will have to answer the door.

On the morning she became a young widow, my grandmother, startled by a sudden shadow, looked up from her work to see a hawk turn her prized rooster into a cloud of feathers. That same moment, halfway around the world in a Minnesota mine, her husband died, buried under a ton of rockfall. She told me this story sixty years ago. I don’t know if it’s true but it ought to be. She was a hard old woman, and though she knelt on Sundays when the acolyte’s silver bell announced the moment of Christ’s miracle, it was the darker mysteries she lived by: shiver-cry of an owl, black dog by the roadside, a tapping at the door and nobody there. The moral of the story was plain enough: miracles become a burden and require a priest to explain them. With signs, you only need to keep your wits about you and place your trust in a shadow world that lets you know hard luck and grief are coming your way. And for that —so the story goes—any day will do.

I loved this tree. South of San Antonio, west of the heart, growing in the ravines of the Pecos River inside me, down across the Rio Grande and up into the Llano’s staked plains, tree of memory, tree of ghosts, tree of rain— under birdsong whispers you cradled me in your canopy. When I was a baby, I stroked the soft hair on your leaves. You were my first true church, and when rains came our whole bodies shook and shimmered with God’s words. You let me bury all my secrets in your dirt and sleep in your altar as we drifted through stars. Forgive me, Tree, for humiliating you. I kicked at your bark. Spit on you. Tree, I cut you and carved cruel words on you in reverse in my rough, crooked cursive, with a rusted green knife I stole from a bitch, scarring your sacred skin. I burned you with a lighter shaped like a cowboy boot, left bird dogs tied to you for days on end, let drill sergeants in training from the nearby base lash out and practice on you. I let belly-gods, plug-ugly bruisers, devouring cowboys and butchers stuff themselves into me, hog-tie me whole and slap me around as you watched. When I laughed and made animal sounds, I scared you. I chewed you out. Made fun of you. I used toxins and poisons to make you immaculate. I wanted you perfect. I nailed a no-trespassing sign and a big security light to your side. I sold pieces of you off. I abandoned you. I abandoned myself. All around us the underground world overflows with love. Season after season you return, sap rising up from your roots, unfinished, always becoming. I defended against love for as long as I could until I couldn’t. You no longer have to hide your self in your deepest self. You no longer need the ones you thought you most needed. I know I am not good at this, or anything really, but I’m trying. Roll on, roll on, roll on— Tonight, I’m wearing a red dress, under a man’s honeyed mouths and tent. Your red flowers open and crown and cover us in a Sunday of pollens. And when I press my ear to your thickness, to your heart, I hear: bells, bells, bells.

Think of the woman who first touched fire to a hollow stone filled with seal oil, how she fiddled with fuel and flame until blue shadows before and after her filled her house, crowded the underground, then fled like sky-captains chasing the aurora’s whale tale green beyond the earth’s curve. Her tenth summer, the elders let her raise her issum, seal pup orphaned when hunters brought in her mother, their grins of plenty broad, red. The women slit the hard belly. Plopped among the ruby innards steaming on rough-cut planks blinked a new sea-child whose first sound came out a question in the old language, a question that in one throaty bark asked who, meaning What family is this? What comfort do you provide for guests? Do you let strangers remain strangers? The women rinsed the slick pup in cool water, crafted a pouch for her to suck. Then the young girl whose hands held light even when the room did not brought this new being beside her bed, let it scatter babiche and split birch gathered for snowshoes, let it nose the caribou neck hairs bearding her dance fans. They held up the fans to their foreheads, playing white hair, playing old. In the time when women do not sew the seal danced at her first potlatch. And when the lamps burned down, no one could see any difference between waves in rock, waves in sea. The pup lifted her nose, licked salt from seven stars, and slipped light back among silvers and chum light among the ghostly belugas swimming far north to offer themselves.

You remember the Incredible Shrinking Man? I said. Well, last night I dreamed I was him. It began the same way. The shirt cuffs were the first thing that came to my attention, drooping down over my knuckles in the bedroom mirror. And my waistband and shoes were getting looser by the day. Within weeks you could perch me on your knee like a male doll. Later you would put me to bed in the empty matchbox. You failed to watch for the spider that came to explore me. I fought her with a darning needle, a button my shield. She retreated from me on a thread. I followed her down to the cellar. How I made my way back I’ll never know. It took me days to travel over the quilt to your hand. No longer a hand but an Alpine range of sleeping flesh. I crawled into an open pore and entered your bloodstream.

Thyrsis, a youth of the inspired train, Fair Sacharissa lov’d, but lov’d in vain; Like Phœbus sung the no less amorous boy; Like Daphne she, as lovely, and as coy; With numbers he the flying nymph pursues, With numbers such as Phœbus’ self might use; Such is the chase when Love and Fancy leads, O’er craggy mountains, and through flow’ry meads; Invok’d to testify the lover’s care, Or form some image of his cruel fair: Urg’d with his fury, like a wounded deer, O’er these he fled; and now approaching near, Had reach’d the nymph with his harmonious lay, Whom all his charms could not incline to stay. Yet what he sung in his immortal strain, Though unsuccessful, was not sung in vain; All but the nymph that should redress his wrong, Attend his passion, and approve his song. Like Phœbus thus, acquiring unsought praise, He catch’d at love, and fill’d his arm with bays.

To keep from ending The story does everything it can, Careful not to overvalue Perfection or undervalue Perfect chance, As I am careful not to do in telling. By now a lot has happened: Bridges under the water, No time outs, Sinewy voices from under the earth Braiding and going straight up In a faint line. I modify to simplify, Complicate to clarify. If you want to know your faults, marry. If you want to know your virtues, die. Then the heroine, Who resembles you in certain particulars, Precipitates the suicide Of the author, wretchedly obscure, Of that slim but turgid volume, By letting slip: Real events don't have endings, Only the stories about them do.

1. Aging, I am a stowaway in the hold of my being. Even memory is a finger to my lips. Once I entered down the center aisle at the Comédie Française, the Artemis of Ephesus on my arm, all eyes on her rows of breasts and me. “Who is this master of her ninety nipples?” the public whispered. Now the ocean is my audience, I see in secret my last secret. 2. Mid-December, my old felt hat that I could have imagined myself leaving behind in a restaurant for eternity blew out into the Atlantic. The damn thing so familiar I saw myself wearing it even into the deep, an aging Narcissus, in white foam and northern sunlight, on my way to becoming a conch. It is like seeing music this growing from flesh and bone into seashell: undulating salts become a purple mantle, and the almost translucent bivalve of memory and forgetting closes.

A straight rain is rare and doors have suspicions and I hold that names begin histories and that the last century was a cruel one. I am pretending to be a truck in Mexico. I am a woman with a long neck and a good burden and I waddle efficiently. Activity never sleeps and no tale of crumbling cliffs can be a short one. I have to shift weight favorably. Happiness can’t be settled. I brush my left knee twice, my right once, my left twice again and in that way advance. The alphabet and the cello can represent horses but I can only pretend to be a dog slurping pudding. After the 55 minutes it takes to finish my legs tremble. All is forgiven. Yesterday is going the way of tomorrow indirectly and the heat of the sun is inadequate at this depth. I see the moon. The verbs ought and can lack infinity and somewhere between 1957 when the heat of the dry sun naughtily struck me and now when my secrets combine in the new order of cold rains and night winds a lot has happened. Long phrases are made up of short phrases that bear everything “in vain” or “all in fun” “for your sake” and “step by step” precisely. I too can spring.