Brenda Shaughnessy

You love a woman and you wonder where she goes all night in some tricked- out taxicab, with her high heels and her corset and her big, fat mouth. You love how she only wears her glasses with you, how thick and cow-eyed she swears it’s only ever you she wants to see. You love her, you want her very ugly. If she is lovely big, you want her scrawny. If she is perfect lithe, you want her ballooned, a cosmonaut. How not to love her, her bouillabaisse, her orangina. When you took her to the doctor the doctor said, “Wow, look at that!” and you were proud, you asshole, you love and that’s how you are in love. Any expert, observing human bodies, can see how she’s exceptional, how she ruins us all. But you really love this woman, how come no one can see this? Everyone must become suddenly very clumsy at recognizing beauty if you are to keep her. You don’t want to lose anything, at all, ever. You want her sex depilated, you want everyone else not blind, but perhaps paralyzed, from the eyes down. You wonder where she goes all night. If she leaves you, you will know everything about love. If she’s leaving you now, you already know it.

Each time we moved to a new apartment, and we did three times, I knew I shouldn't, that I should leave while I had the chance, but each time we moved to a new apartment we were desperate, had been kicked out or priced out and we only had one bed, no savings, just friends some of whom knew that you fractured your hand punching through a wall, inches from my head, and some of whom were aware that you threw things at me when I said things you didn't like, as if my words were things I threw at you first. It made sense to you. I can't remember the bad things I said—my self-serving memory enraged you, and why not: I always remembered the bad things you did. And, yes, I do remember everything you threw: a chair over our heads at a bar (Liz was there), a mirror like a frisbee aimed at my knees, a carton of fried rice that splat on the shade of our only nice lamp, oil stains patterned it with tiny bugs. Also, you threw me against a wall, but you always said it was because I made you so mad because you loved me so much and didn't want to lose me that you'd lose control instead and later beg me to stay, that if I left you it meant you would never be loved and I couldn't bear to have you think that about either one of us. I wasn't someone who'd let herself be hit; I'd never take that from a man. A man would be a criminal if he did what you did. But you had been hurt and all that pain and anger needed more time, and I made you so crazy, I was so stubborn and good at mean words, what else were you supposed to do? You liked to raise your fist pretending to hit me and then half-smile when I winced or cringed. It was important that you had never actually hit me, never punched me with a closed fist: you'd only grabbed me and choked me and flung me and made dents in the wall next to me, and narrowly missed me, but we knew you meant to miss, never truly meant to clobber me on the head with something heavy, something light, maybe, like a book I loved. When a woman you love hits you on the head with a book you love, is that love? I was so ashamed and afraid someone would find out about us, then I was afraid and ashamed people already knew but didn't know what to do. Did I really think this was a secret? Not from the cops we called during two bad fights or from Peggy who let you stay with her rent-free that month I kicked you out. You two had a blast. But I couldn't pay the rent on my own, so you moved back in, triumphant, Peggy still in love with you, and you gloated about how much money you'd saved. Surrounded by friends, whom could I tell? Why would I tell anyone who didn't already know us well enough to already know? If everyone knew, none of us said so. We talked, all of us, almost constantly, intimately, so how did we keep ourselves so quiet? You and I, together in this, were alone with this, alone among women who loved us. The two of us never more alone than when together.

I am dreaming of a house just like this one but larger and opener to the trees, nighter than day and higher than noon, and you, visiting, knocking to get in, hoping for icy milk or hot tea or whatever it is you like. For each night is a long drink in a short glass. A drink of blacksound water, such a rush and fall of lonesome no form can contain it. And if it isn’t night yet, though I seem to recall that it is, then it is not for everyone. Did you receive my invitation? It is not for everyone. Please come to my house lit by leaf light. It’s like a book with bright pages filled with flocks and glens and groves and overlooked by Pan, that seductive satyr in whom the fish is also cooked. A book that took too long to read but minutes to unread— that is—to forget. Strange are the pages thus. Nothing but the hope of company. I made too much pie in expectation. I was hoping to sit with you in a tree house in a nightgown in a real way. Did you receive my invitation? Written in haste, before leaf blinked out, before the idea fully formed. An idea like a storm cloud that does not spill or arrive but moves silently in a direction. Like a dark book in a long life with a vague hope in a wood house with an open door.

Oh, yes, the rain is sorry. Unfemale, of course, the rain is with her painted face still plain and with such pixel you’d never see it in the pure freckling, the lacquer of her. The world is lighter with her recklessness, a handkerchief so wet it is clear. To you. My withered place, this frumpy home (nearer to the body than to evening) miserable beloved. I lie tender and devout with insomnia, perfect on the center pillow past midnight, sick with the thought of another year of waking, solved and happy, it has never been this way! Believe strangers who say the end is close for what could be closer? You are my stranger and see how we have closed. On both ends. Night wets me all night, blind, carried. And watermarks. The plough of the rough on the slick, love, a tendency toward fever. To break. To soil. Would I dance with you? Both forever and rather die. It would be like dying, yes. Yes I would. I have loved the slaking of your forgetters, your indifferent hands on my loosening. Through a thousand panes of glass not all transparent, and the temperature. I felt that. What you say is not less than that.

There are two kinds of people, soldiers and women, as Virginia Woolf said. Both for decoration only. Now that is too kind. It’s technical: virgins and wolves. We have choices now. Two little girls walk into a bar, one orders a shirley temple. Shirley Temple’s pimp comes over and says you won’t be sorry. She’s a fine piece of work but she don’t come cheap. Myself, I’m in less fear of predators than of walking around in my mother’s body. That’s sneaky, that’s more than naked. Let’s even it up: you go on fuming in your gray room. I am voracious alone. Blank and loose, metallic lingerie. And rare black-tipped cigarettes in a handmade basket case. Which of us weaves the world together with a quicker blur of armed seduction: your war-on-thugs, my body stockings. Ascetic or carnivore. Men will crack your glaze even if you leave them before morning. Pigs ride the sirens in packs. Ah, flesh, technoflesh, there are two kinds of people. Hot with mixed light, drunk on insult. You and me.

If it takes me all day, I will get the word freshened out of this poem. I put it in the first line, then moved it to the second, and now it won’t come out. It’s stuck. I’m so frustrated, so I went out to my little porch all covered in snow and watched the icicles drip, as I smoked a cigarette. Finally I reached up and broke a big, clear spike off the roof with my bare hand. And used it to write a word in the snow. I wrote the word snow. I can’t stand myself.

It’s easy to make more of myself by eating, and sometimes easy’s the thing. To be double-me, half the trouble but not lonely. Making cakes to celebrate any old day. Eating too much: the emperor of being used. Nature, mature and feminized, naturalizes me naturally by creating the feeling of being a natural woman, like a sixteen-year-old getting knocked up again. To solve that problem, there’s the crispness of not eating, a pane of glass with a bloody-edged body, that is, having the baby at the prom undetected and, in a trance of self-preservation, throwing it away in the girls’ room trash. Buried under paper towels, silent. Nothing could be better, for the teenager. For me, starving, that coreless, useful feeling, is not making myself smaller but making myself bigger, inside. It’s prince and pauper both, it’s starving artist and good model in one masterpiece. It rhymes with marveling and that’s no accident. Fullness is dullness. Dreaming’s too easy. But sometimes I don’t care. Sometimes I put in just the right amount, but then I’m the worst kinds of patsy, a chump giving myself over to myself like a criminal to the law, with nothing to show for it. No reward, no news, no truth. It’s too sad to be so ordinary every day. Like some kind of employee. Being told what to do. Chop off a finger to plant in fertilizer (that is, in used animal food), to grow a finger tree. More fingers for me. Stop saying finger. I’m the one in charge here. Stop the madness and just eat the mirror. Put it in sideways or crush it into a powder. It doesn’t hurt and it works. Mouth full, don’t talk. Nothing to say. I’ll be a whole new person. I’ll make her myself. Then we’ll walk away. We’ll say to each other how she’s changed. How we wouldn’t have recognized us.

Where you are tender, you speak your plural. Roland Barthes 1 One version of the story is I wish you back— that I used each evening evening out what all day spent wrinkling. I bought a dress that was so extravagantly feminine you could see my ovaries through it. This is how I thought I would seduce you. This is how frantic I hollowed out. 2 Another way of telling it is to hire some kind of gnarled and symbolic troll to make a tape recording. Of plastic beads coming unglued from a child’s jewelry box. This might be an important sound, like serotonin or mighty mitochondria, so your body hears about how you stole the ring made from a glittery opiate and the locket that held candy. 3 It’s only fair that I present yet another side, as insidious as it is, because two sides hold up nothing but each other. A tentacled skepticism, a suspended contempt, such fancies and toxins form a third wall. A mean way to end and I never dreamed we meant it. 4 Another way of putting it is like slathering jam on a scrape. Do sweets soothe pain or simply make it stick? Which is the worst! So much technology and no fix for sticky if you can’t taste it. I mean there’s no relief unless. So I’m coming, all this excitement, to your house. To a place where there’s no room for play. It is possible you’ll lock me out and I’ll finally focus on making mudcakes look solid in the rain. 5 In some cultures the story told is slightly different— in that it is set in an aquarium and the audience participates as various fish. The twist comes when it is revealed that the most personally attractive fish have eyes only on one side and repel each other like magnets. The starfish is the size of an eraser and does as much damage. Starfish, the eponymous and still unlikely hero, has those five pink moving suckerpads that allow endless permutations so no solid memory, no recent history, nothing better, left unsaid. 6 The story exists even when there are no witnesses, kissers, tellers. Because secrets secrete, and these versions tend to be slapstick, as if in a candy factory the chocolate belted down the conveyor too fast or everyone turned sideways at the same time by accident. This little tale tries so hard to be humorous, wants so badly to win affection and to lodge. Because nothing is truly forgotten and loved. 7 Three million Richards can’t be wrong. So when they levy a critique of an undertaking which, in their view, overtakes, I take it seriously. They think one may start a tale off whingy and wretched in a regular voice. But when one strikes out whimsically, as if meta-is-better, as if it isn’t you, as if this story is happening to nobody it is only who you are fooling that’s nobody. The Richards believe you cannot privately jettison into the sky, just for fun. You must stack stories from the foundation up. From the sad heart and the feet tired of supporting it. Language is architecture, after all, not an air capsule, not a hang glide. This is real life. So don’t invite anyone to a house that hasn’t been built. Because no one unbuilds meticulously and meticulosity is what allows hearing. Three million Richards make one point. I hear it in order to make others. Mistake. 8 As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story. I was wrong to tell you how muti-true everything is, when it would be truer to say nothing. I’ve invented so much and prevented more. But, I’d like to talk with you about other things, in absolute quiet. In extreme context. To see you again, isn’t love revision? It could have gone so many ways. This just one of the ways it went. Tell me another.

There were seven colors of mourning, one was lilac. That kind of blossom always has its crowd, fanned out, surrounded by crushing likeness, smell of itself. Fabric has to breathe, at least 2%, like skin. A little milkfat, elastane even in the gravest print. Not knowing how to grieve can poison like a directionless dart. And although fabric has been known to swirl and clasp, be clasped — without mother there’s only art. To hug the body: a swath, anathema, magical, seventies lace and spacedust, all too far gone to truly love. But to twist it, to learn to hate-want. To sway, tear, burrow, be borrowed, everybody’s animal. To float like water seeking its own, stampede like buffalo, seeking its hide. Face painted on torso on horsehair on chesty silk it’s a deathmask for the stigmata slash of the model’s body. • I don’t think I understand what studying is. I listen, I read, I remember, I absorb. I let myself be moved and changed. Is that “studying?” Never five-fingered, you never use them all, gloves will be like hooves, split-footed, hand-stitched. When concept perceived — a womanly gist, let’s say, or a curve of mind — is more than itself (surpassing, all maw) I make it part of me. I take it in, drink a corrosive. I let it overtake me, change everything it can, lip to tip to rim. My eyes just drink the fabric that covers each surface of this world. Suck up the plastic through a polished straw. Everything’s inspiration: trees reflected in windows on buildings, distorted buses endless frames, all too glass, so much lens, textures so tall, and once you start to see things this way, vision’s a performance, shocking and true after all these centuries, a Shakespearean volta, like nectar is poison to the occasional queen bee. Everything actually is blurred, not just how you see. Glasses and shoes are solutions to problems that are real problems, that of blurred world, that of touching the ground. A glass corset for the heart to see out its chest. For without glasses, the eye better sees the wind, by feeling it and closing against its grains, its grasses. For without shoes, my feet become shoes. When I am really feeling, I get very tired, I fall asleep for the seventeenth time on the unfinished skirt of glass eyes and lemon zest hemmed first, grown last. I experience the world as infinite invertedness: no wholes broken, just potential fragments straining, skull-like, at the seams. Anything could give. But no, just takes and takes and takes. • I’ve been trying to write the words, “I cried. Cried really and wetly, and for good.” Old-fashioned writing with intense excitement: the spell of quill and ink spill, quelled. What is beautiful, what is terrifying, what is absurd in me? Every possibility that colors are believable, various, not that mirage I thought I’d seen and can be held apart as unreal, too exterior, distinct from each other wildly as sparks to seaweed or flower to meteor. It collapsed, can’t draw it can’t cut it out of itself. There is no color but what’s already inside the eye, no power or invention or new way to wake up in the morning outside the seeing mechanism, our own orbs. Yet I can’t see myself. I can never see you again. I can only see from inside my skull and when I look down I close everything not just my eyes. I wrap my own tender nether flesh in calfskin leather so buttery, melted back together like so: a newborn softened in its own mother’s milk. • I awoke in a panic (no ma no ma) to the smallest day yet. I dreamed I already dreamed all the dreams I’d get. This morning I dressed in my last dress’s last dress, fit only for a genteel gothic murder, covered up well — airtight, would only fit the stabbed one, after bloodlet. Then, like a glove. Who wears it and where? I will, from the bed to the chair. Headrest, clotheshorse. Designer and model: mutually orbiting the best metaphor for bodiless idea. Amorphous, amorous, amoral, immortal. Red is dead, said blue, to you too? Hindquarter-gauze with silver face clamp and sickened ears pulled, unskulled. Broken backpiece. Shadow sensible by other than sight. To smell a shadow. To strike it. To trace it later, to measure a body by its line. Light’s so quiet. You’d think its cuttings, its edge-hole, those mousy children, would squeak at least a bit. They run like a stocking down the leg of the mind. Why not quieter then? There is no body without life. There is no mind without body. There is no without.

If only you’d been a better mother. How could I have been a better mother? I would have needed a better self, and that is a gift I never received. So you’re saying it’s someone else’s fault? The gift of having had a better mother myself, my own mother having had a better mother herself. The gift that keeps on not being given. Who was supposed to give it? How am I supposed to know? Well, how am I supposed to live? I suppose you must live as if you had been given better to live with. Comb your hair, for instance. I cut off my hair, to sell for the money to buy you what you wanted. I wanted nothing but your happiness. I can’t give you that! What would Jesus do? He had a weird mother too . . . Use the myrrh, the frankincense, as if it were given unconditionally, your birthright. It’s a riddle. All gifts are a riddle, all lives are in the middle of mother-lives. But it’s always winter in this world. There is no end to ending. The season of giving, the season when the bears are never cold, because they are sleeping. The bears are never cold, Mama, but I am one cold, cold bear.