Ai

Lightning hits the roof, shoves the knife, darkness, deep in the walls. They bleed light all over us and your face, the fan, folds up, so I won’t see how afraid to be with me you are. We don’t mix, even in bed, where we keep ending up. There’s no need to hide it: you’re snow, I’m coal, I’ve got the scars to prove it. But open your mouth, I’ll give you a taste of black you won’t forget. For a while, I’ll let it make you strong, make your heart lion, then I’ll take it back.

You keep me waiting in a truck with its one good wheel stuck in the ditch, while you piss against the south side of a tree. Hurry. I’ve got nothing on under my skirt tonight. That still excites you, but this pickup has no windows and the seat, one fake leather thigh, pressed close to mine is cold. I’m the same size, shape, make as twenty years ago, but get inside me, start the engine; you’ll have the strength, the will to move. I’ll pull, you push, we’ll tear each other in half. Come on, baby, lay me down on my back. Pretend you don’t owe me a thing and maybe we’ll roll out of here, leaving the past stacked up behind us; old newspapers nobody’s ever got to read again.

I scissor the stem of the red carnation and set it in a bowl of water. It floats the way your head would, if I cut it off. But what if I tore you apart for those afternoons when I was fifteen and so like a bird of paradise slaughtered for its feathers. Even my name suggested wings, wicker cages, flight. Come, sit on my lap, you said. I felt as if I had flown there; I was weightless. You were forty and married. That she was my mother never mattered. She was a door that opened onto me. The three of us blended into a kind of somnolence and musk, the musk of Sundays. Sweat and sweetness. That dried plum and licorice taste always back of my tongue and your tongue against my teeth, then touching mine. How many times?— I counted, but could never remember. And when I thought we’d go on forever, that nothing could stop us as we fell endlessly from consciousness, orders came: War in the north. Your sword, the gold epaulets, the uniform so brightly colored, so unlike war, I thought. And your horse; how you rode out the gate. No, how that horse danced beneath you toward the sound of cannon fire. I could hear it, so many leagues away. I could see you fall, your face scarlet, the horse dancing on without you. And at the same moment, Mother sighed and turned clumsily in the hammock, the Madeira in the thin-stemmed glass spilled into the grass, and I felt myself hardening to a brandy-colored wood, my skin, a thousand strings drawn so taut that when I walked to the house I could hear music tumbling like a waterfall of China silk behind me. I took your letter from my bodice. Salome, I heard your voice, little bird, fly. But I did not. I untied the lilac ribbon at my breasts and lay down on your bed. After a while, I heard Mother's footsteps, watched her walk to the window. I closed my eyes and when I opened them the shadow of a sword passed through my throat and Mother, dressed like a grenadier, bent and kissed me on the lips.

“Earth is the birth of the blues,” sang Yellow Bertha, as she chopped cotton beside Mama Rose. It was as hot as any other summer day, when she decided to run away. Folks say she made a fortune running a whorehouse in New Orleans, but others say she’s buried somewhere out west, her grave unmarked, though you can find it in the dark by the scent of jasmine and mint, but I’m getting ahead of myself. If it wasn’t for hell, we’d all be tapdancing with the devil Mama Rose used to say, but as it is, we just stand and watch, while someone else burns up before salvation. “People desire damnation, Bertha,” she said, unwrapping the rag from her head to let the sweat flow down the corn rows, plaited as tightly as the night coming down on the high and mighty on judgment day. They say she knew what was coming, because she threw some bones that morning. She bent down to pick up her rag which had fallen and when she straightened up, her yellow gal had gone down the road. “Go then,” she called out, “I didn’t want you no how.” Then she started talking to herself about how Old White John caught her milking cows. “He wrestled me to the ground and did his nastiness.” He said, “your daddy was a slave and his daddy and I’m claiming back what’s mine.” It was July. I remember fireworks going off outside. When Bertha come, so white she liked to scared me to death, I let her suckle my breast and I said, “All right, little baby, maybe I’ll love you. Maybe.” Mama Rose said she did her best, but it’s hard to raise a gal like that with everybody thinking she’s giving them the high hat, because she’s so light and got those green eyes that look right through you. She frightens people. Even men, who’re usually wanting to saddle up and ride that kind of mare, can’t abide her. They’re afraid if they try her, they’ll never be the same. The only ones willing are white. They’re watching her day and night, but they know John swore to kill any man who touched her, because lo and behold, he owns up to her. He’s proud of her. Nobody can believe it. He’s even at her baptism. He buys her cheap dresses and candy at the store. He hands it to her out the door, because she can’t go in. He won’t, he won’t stop looking at her like it’s some kind of miracle she was born looking so much like him and his people. It’s a warning, or something. “It’s evil turning back on itself,” said the preacher the Sunday cut clean through by the truth, by the living proof, as Old John stood up in church and testified to the power of God, who spoke to him that morning, telling him he was a sinner. He died that winter. Horrible suffering, they say. He had a stroke on the way to town. His car ran off the road and he drowned. They say Bertha found him. They say she ran all the way to town for the doctor, who told her, “I am not a colored doctor,” so she went and got the sheriff. He listened for a while, then he locked her in a cell. He said he knew she was guilty of something. Well, after a while, Rose went down there and I swear she nearly had a fit. “Get my daughter out here,” she said. “How can you lock up your own brother’s child?” The sheriff knew it was true, so finally he said, “You take her and don’t ever cross my path again.” When Bertha passed him on the way out, he tripped her with his foot. When she got off the floor, she said, “Every dog has its day.” From that time to this is a straight line, pointing at a girl, who doesn’t even have shoes anymore, as she runs down the road, throwing off her ragged clothes, as she goes, until she’s as naked as the day she was born. When she comes to washing hanging on the line, she grabs a fine dress and keeps on running. She’s crying and laughing at the same time. Along comes a truck that says J. GOODY on the side. The man driving stops to give her a ride. He swings the door open on the passenger side, but Bertha says, “Move over, I’ll drive.” When she asks him why he stopped, he says, “I know white trash, when I see it. You’re just like me, but you're a girl. You’re pretty. You can free yourself. All you have to do is show a little leg and some titty in the big city.” He gave her fifty cents and a wink and she started thinking she might as well turn white. She got a job waiting table in a dance hall. One night, the boss heard her singing along with the band. He said, “Why don’t you go up on stage,” and she said, “I play piano too.” He said, “Howdy do.” From then on, she made everybody pay one way, or another. She got hard. She took lovers— fathers, sons, and husbands. It didn't matter, but once in a while, she heard her mother’s voice, saying, “You made the wrong choice,” and she felt the blues and she let loose with a shout. “Lordy,” said the boss, “you sound colored.” More and more people came to hear her sing, but they kind of feared her too. They said, she was too white to sing the blues like that. It wasn’t right. One night, she got to talking with the boss. He walked round and round the office, shaking his head, saying how much he’d lose, if she stopped singing the blues. “How often can you find a treasure like mine,” he said, laying his hand on her shoulder, then he said, “If I weren’t so old,” and his voice dropped off to a whisper, then he said, “I got the answer now, sweet Roberta. Go on down to the dressing room and wait.” It didn't take long. He came in and set a jar on the table. “What do I do with this?” Asked Bertha. He said, “you’re going to pass for colored.” Suddenly, she was wearing blackface. Suddenly, she was safe on the other side of the door she slammed on the past and it was standing open at last. She could come and go as she pleased and no one saw her enter, or leave. She was free, she was freed, but she didn’t feel it and she needed it to be real. She went on, though. She flowed like a river, carrying the body of a man, who had himself a nigger, because he could. She lived. She got old. She almost froze one cold spell and she got up from her sickbed and told her daughter she got during the change of life it was time to go. She sewed a note to her ragged coat. It said, “This is the granddaughter of Mama Rose.” She put fifty cents in her hand and went to stand with her at the bus stop. She would not return, but her child had earned the right to go home. When I got off the bus, a hush fell over the people waiting there. I was as white as my mother, but my eyes were gray, not green. I had hair down to my waist and braids so thick they weighed me down. Mother said, my father was a white musician from another town, who found out her secret and left her and me to keep it. Mama Rose knew me, though, blind as she was. “What color are you, gal?” She asked and I told her, “I’m as black as last night.” That's how I passed, without asking permission.

for Yukio Mishima I didn’t write Etsuko, I sliced her open. She was carmine inside like a sea bass and empty. No viscera, nothing but color. I love you like that, boy. I pull the kimono down around your shoulders and kiss you. Then you let it fall open. Each time, I cut you a little and when you leave, I take the piece, broil it, dip it in ginger sauce and eat it. It burns my mouth so. You laugh, holding me belly-down with your body. So much hurting to get to this moment, when I’m beneath you, wanting it to go on and to end. At midnight, you say see you tonight and I answer there won’t be any tonight, but you just smile, swing your sweater over your head and tie the sleeves around your neck. I hear you whistling long after you disappear down the subway steps, as I walk back home, my whole body tingling. I undress and put the bronze sword on my desk beside the crumpled sheet of rice paper. I smooth it open and read its single sentence: I meant to do it. No. It should be common and feminine like I can’t go on sharing him, or something to imply that. Or the truth: that I saw in myself the five signs of the decay of the angel and you were holding on, watching and free, that I decided to go out with the pungent odor of this cold and consuming passion in my nose: death. Now, I’ve said it. That vulgar word that drags us down to the worms, sightless, predestined. Goddamn you, boy. Nothing I said mattered to you; that bullshit about Etsuko or about killing myself. I tear the note, then burn it. The alarm clock goes off. 5:45 A.M. I take the sword and walk into the garden. I look up. The sun, the moon, two round teeth rock together and the light of one chews up the other. I stab myself in the belly, wait, then stab myself again. Again. It’s snowing. I’ll turn to ice, but I’ll burn anyone who touches me. I start pulling my guts out, those red silk cords, spiraling skyward, and I’m climbing them past the moon and the sun, past darkness into white. I mean to live.

1. RUSSIA, 1927 On the day the sienna-skinned man held my shoulders between his spade-shaped hands, easing me down into the azure water of Jordan, I woke ninety-three million miles from myself, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, shoulder-deep in the Volga, while the cheap dye of my black silk shirt darkened the water. My head wet, water caught in my lashes. Am I blind? I rub my eyes, then wade back to shore, undress and lie down, until Stalin comes from his place beneath the birch tree. He folds my clothes and I button myself in my marmot coat, and together we start the long walk back to Moscow. He doesn’t ask,what did you see in the river?, but I hear the hosts of a man drowning in water and holiness, the castrati voices I can’t recognize, skating on knives, from trees, from air on the thin ice of my last night in Russia. Leon Trotsky. Bread. I want to scream, but silence holds my tongue with small spade-shaped hands and only this comes, so quietly Stalin has to press his ear to my mouth: I have only myself. Put me on the train. I won’t look back.

My sister rubs the doll’s face in mud, then climbs through the truck window. She ignores me as I walk around it, hitting the flat tires with an iron rod. The old man yells for me to help hitch the team, but I keep walking around the truck, hitting harder, until my mother calls. I pick up a rock and throw it at the kitchen window, but it falls short. The old man’s voice bounces off the air like a ball I can’t lift my leg over. I stand beside him, waiting, but he doesn’t look up and I squeeze the rod, raise it, his skull splits open. Mother runs toward us. I stand still, get her across the spine as she bends over him. I drop the rod and take the rifle from the house. Roses are red, violets are blue, one bullet for the black horse, two for the brown. They’re down quick. I spit, my tongue’s bloody; I’ve bitten it. I laugh, remember the one out back. I catch her climbing from the truck, shoot. The doll lands on the ground with her. I pick it up, rock it in my arms. Yeah. I’m Jack, Hogarth’s son. I’m nimble, I’m quick. In the house, I put on the old man’s best suit and his patent leather shoes. I pack my mother’s satin nightgown and my sister’s doll in the suitcase. Then I go outside and cross the fields to the highway. I’m fourteen. I’m a wind from nowhere. I can break your heart.

Overhead, the match burns out, but the chunk of ice in the back seat keeps melting from imagined heat, while the old Hudson tiptoes up the slope. My voile blouse, so wet it is transparent, like one frightened hand, clutches my chest. The bag of rock salt sprawled beside me wakes, thirsty and stretches a shaky tongue toward the ice. I press the gas pedal hard. I’ll get back to the house, the dirt yard, the cesspool, to you out back, digging a well you could fill with your sweat, though there is not one reason I should want to. You never notice me until the end of the day, when your hand is on my knee and the ice cream, cooked to broth, is hot enough to burn the skin off my touch.

When the rooster jumps up on the windowsill and spreads his red-gold wings, I wake, thinking it is the sun and call Juanita, hearing her answer, but only in my mind. I know she is already outside, breaking the cane off at ground level, using only her big hands. I get the machete and walk among the cane, until I see her, lying face-down in the dirt. Juanita, dead in the morning like this. I raise the machete— what I take from the earth, I give back— and cut off her feet. I lift the body and carry it to the wagon, where I load the cane to sell in the village. Whoever tastes my woman in his candy, his cake, tastes something sweeter than this sugar cane; it is grief. If you eat too much of it, you want more, you can never get enough.

for Robert Lowell We smile at each other and I lean back against the wicker couch. How does it feel to be dead? I say. You touch my knees with your blue fingers. And when you open your mouth, a ball of yellow light falls to the floor and burns a hole through it. Don’t tell me, I say. I don't want to hear. Did you ever, you start, wear a certain kind of silk dress and just by accident, so inconsequential you barely notice it, your fingers graze that dress and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper, you see it too and you realize how that image is simply the extension of another image, that your own life is a chain of words that one day will snap. Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands, and beginning to rise heavenward in their confirmation dresses, like white helium balloons, the wreaths of flowers on their heads spinning, and above all that, that’s where I’m floating, and that’s what it’s like only ten times clearer, ten times more horrible. Could anyone alive survive it?