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1. After the sweet promise, the summer’s mild retreat from mother’s cancer, the winter months of her death, I come to this white office, its sterile sheet, its hard tablet, its stirrups, to hold my breath while I, who must, allow the glove its oily rape, to hear the almost mighty doctor over me equate my ills with hers and decide to operate. It grew in her as simply as a child would grow, as simply as she housed me once, fat and female. Always my most gentle house before that embryo of evil spread in her shelter and she grew frail. Frail, we say, remembering fear, that face we wear in the room of the special smells of dying, fear where the snoring mouth gapes and is not dear. There was snow everywhere. Each day I grueled through its sloppy peak, its blue-struck days, my boots slapping into the hospital halls, past the retinue of nurses at the desk, to murmur in cahoots with hers outside her door, to enter with the outside air stuck on my skin, to enter smelling her pride, her upkeep, and to lie as all who love have lied. No reason to be afraid, my almost mighty doctor reasons. I nod, thinking that woman’s dying must come in seasons, thinking that living is worth buying. I walk out, scuffing a raw leaf, kicking the clumps of dead straw that were this summer’s lawn. Automatically I get in my car, knowing the historic thief is loose in my house and must be set upon. 2. Clean of the body’s hair, I lie smooth from breast to leg. All that was special, all that was rare is common here. Fact: death too is in the egg. Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat. And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet. The rooms down the hall are calling all night long, while the night outside sucks at the trees. I hear limbs falling and see yellow eyes flick in the rain. Wide eyed and still whole I turn in my bin like a shorn lamb. A nurse’s flashlight blinds me to see who I am. The walls color in a wash of daylight until the room takes its objects into itself again. I smoke furtively and squash the butt and hide it with my watch and other effects. The halls bustle with legs. I smile at the nurse who smiles for the morning shift. Day is worse. Scheduled late, I cannot drink or eat, except for yellow pills and a jigger of water. I wait and think until she brings two mysterious needles: the skills she knows she knows, promising, soon you’ll be out. But nothing is sure. No one. I wait in doubt. I wait like a kennel of dogs jumping against their fence. At ten she returns, laughs and catalogues my resistance to drugs. On the stretcher, citizen and boss of my own body still, I glide down the halls and rise in the iron cage toward science and pitfalls. The great green people stand over me; I roll on the table under a terrible sun, following their command to curl, head touching knee if I am able. Next, I am hung up like a saddle and they begin. Pale as an angel I float out over my own skin. I soar in hostile air over the pure women in labor, over the crowning heads of babies being born. I plunge down the backstair calling mother at the dying door, to rush back to my own skin, tied where it was torn. Its nerves pull like wires snapping from the leg to the rib. Strangers, their faces rolling lilke hoops, require my arm. I am lifted into my aluminum crib. 3. Skull flat, here in my harness, thick with shock, I call mother to help myself, call toe to frog, that woolly bat, that tongue of dog; call God help and all the rest. The soul that swam the furious water sinks now in flies and the brain flops like a docked fish and the eyes are flat boat decks riding out the pain. My nurses, those starchy ghosts, hover over me for my lame hours and my lame days. The mechanics of the body pump for their tricks. I rest on their needles, am dosed and snoring amid the orange flowers and the eyes of visitors. I wear, like some senile woman, a scarlet candy package ribbon in my hair. Four days from home I lurk on my mechanical parapet with two pillows at my elbows, as soft as praying cushions. My knees work with the bed that runs on power. I grumble to forget the lie I ought to hear, but don't. God knows I thought I’d die—but here I am, recalling mother, the sound of her good morning, the odor of orange and jam. All’s well, they say. They say I’m better. I lounge in frills or, picturesque, I wear bunny pink slippers in the hall. I read a new book and shuffle past the desk to mail the author my first fan letter. Time now to pack this humpty-dumpty back the frightened way she came and run along, Anne, and run along now, my stomach laced like a football for the game.

The air tonight is thick as curry; like every night this summer I could cut it with my wine glass, spray it with mace. Over and over it would heal together like a wound, follow my click and pace of heels down Conti Street, St. Ann, Bourbon. Oh Hamlet, if you could see me now as I pump and swagger across that stage, cape dripping to the floor, me in three-inch heels and a technicolor G-string— you would not wish me in a convent. They’ve made me a queen here, married me off to a quarter bag and a pint of gin. The old men tend bark and splatter, rabid at each table. I think they stay up all night just to spite the moon. They bring their diseased mouths to the French Market in the morning, sell Creole tomatoes to tourists who don’t know what they are. Each bald head shines plump and red. It seems like so long ago that I modeled for those legs outside of Big Daddy’s— the ones over the door that swing in, out, in, out— the sculptor made me painted as Mardi Gras. I thought you might recognize them if you ever passed with the boys, parading from Abbey to Tavern, or think them royal feet in need of slippers. Someday I expect to find you here, sitting at the table between the first and second rows, fingering bones or something worse. And in the end you will throw me a columbine, light me a Marlboro and take me to a 24-7 where jukebox light quivers, makes us as thin as ghosts. But for now, I will dance for the fat man who sits in your place and sweats his love for me at 3 a.m., because only he knows I am Horatio in drag.

Opportunity I love you Windows and watermelons march down the street The air is nobody Sky is in position I am ready to endure my freedom A riderless horse on a saffron plain A lake that spins A tree that lets the wind decide

I do not know if, climbing some steep hill, Through fragrant wooded pass, this glimpse I bought, Or whether in some mid-day I was caught To upper air, where visions of God’s will In pictures to our quickened sense fulfil His word. But this I saw. A path I sought Through wall of rock. No human fingers wrought The golden gates which opened sudden, still, And wide. My fear was hushed by my delight. Surpassing fair the lands; my path lay plain; Alas, so spell-bound, feasting on the sight, I paused, that I but reached the threshold bright, When, swinging swift, the golden gates again Were rocky wall, by which I wept in vain.

You are running away from everyone who loves you, from your family, from old lovers, from friends. They run after you with accumulations of a former life, copper earrings, plates of noodles, banners of many lost revolutions. You love to say the trees are naked now because it never happens in your country. This is a mystery from which you will never recover. And yes, the trees are naked now, everything that still breathes in them lies silent and stark and waiting. You love October most of all, how there is no word for so much splendor. This, too, is a source of consolation. Between you and memory everything is water. Names of the dead, or saints, or history. There is a realm in which —no, forget it, it’s still too early to make anyone understand. A man drives a stake through his own heart and afterwards the opposite of nostalgia begins to make sense: he stops raking the leaves and the leaves take over and again he has learned to let go.

Of the face in general, let me say it’s a house built by men and lived in by their dreams. When you’ve been plucking eyes out of the floorboards as long as I have, you’ll see this, just as you’d see the patience it requires to render an eyebrown, half an hour and an understanding of architecture. When you see your body, think its opposite: not the bridge, but its lighted face reflecting the water, some other city as seen from a ship— your forehead, once ponderous, now light as umbrellas— still not beautiful enough to make time stop. The pleasure in being a woman’s knowing everything’s borrowed and can’t be denied, as when you take apart a clock, there’s always another inside.

Art what do the art suppressors care about art they jump on bandwagons wallow in press clips & stink up the planet with their pornographic oppression Art what do they care about art they go from being contemporary baby kissers to old time corrupt politicians to self-appointed censorship clerks who won't support art but will support war poverty lung cancer racism colonialism and toxic sludge that's their morality that's their religious conviction that's their protection of the public & contribution to family entertainment what do they care about art

When I painted, everybody saw. When I played piano, everybody heard. I ate your raspberries. The sign no trespassing applied to me. Now, the hemlocks have grown higher than the house. There’s moss on my stoop, a little mildew In the shower but you’ve never seen my shower. I can undress by the window, I can sleep in the barn. The sky, which is cloudy, Suits the earth to which it belongs.

Or Oreo, or worse. Or ordinary. Or your choice of category or Color or any color other than Colored or Colored Only. Or “Of Color” or Other or theory or discourse or oral territory. Oregon or Georgia or Florida Zora or Opportunity or born poor or Corporate. Or Moor. Or a Noir Orpheus or Senghor or Diaspora or a horrendous and tore-up journey. Or performance. Or allegory’s armor of ignorant comfort or Worship or reform or a sore chorus. Or Electoral Corruption or important ports of Yoruba or worry or Neighbor or fear of . . . of terror or border. Or all organized minorities.

The Roman Catholic bells of Princeton, New Jersey, wake me from rousing dreams into a resounding hangover. Sweet Jesus, my life is hateful to me. Seven a.m. and time to walk my dog on a leash. Ice on the sidewalk and in the gutters, and the wind comes down our one-way street like a deuce-and-a-half, a six-by, a semi, huge with a cold load of growls. There's not only leaf left to bear witness, with twitch and scuttle, rattle and rasp, against the blatant roaring of the wrongway wind. Only my nose running and my face frozen into a kind of grin which has nothing to do with the ice and the wind or death and December, but joy pure and simple when my black and tan puppy, for the first time ever, lifts his hind leg to pee.