Brenda Shaughnessy

In a light chocolatine room with blackout windows, a loud clock drowns in soft dawn’s syllables, crisscrossed with a broken cloudiness I’d choose as my own bedcovers but cannot. My choice of sleep or sky has no music of its own. There’s no “its own” while the baby cries. Oh, the baby cries. He howls and claws like a wrongly minor red wolf who doesn’t know his mother. I know I am his mother, but I can’t quite click on the word’s essential aspects, can’t denude the flora or disrobe the kind of housecoat “mother” always is. Something cunty, something used. Whatever meaning the word itself is covering, like underwear, that meaning is so mere and meager this morning. Mother. Baby. Chicken and egg. It’s so obnoxious of me: I was an egg who had  an egg and now I’m a chicken, as usual scooping up both possibilities, or what I used to call possibilities. I used to be this way, so ontologically greedy, wanting to be it all. Serves me right. My belief in the fluidity of the self turns out to mean my me is a flow of wellwater, without the well, or the bucket, a hole dug and seeping. A kind of unwell, where the ground reabsorbs what it was displaced to give. The drain gives meaning to the sieve. As I said: a chicken who still wants to be all potential. Someone who springs and falls, who cannot see how many of us I have in me—and I do not like them all. Do I like us? Can I love us? If anyone comes first it’s him, but how can that be? I was here way, way first. I have the breasts, godawful, and he the lungs and we share the despair. For we are a we, aren’t we? We split a self in such a way that there isn’t enough for either of us. The father of the baby is sleepy and present in his way, in the way of fathers. He is devoted like few fathers, and maybe hurts like I hurt, like no fathers. I don’t know what someone else feels, not even these someones who are also me. Do they hurt like I do?  Why can’t they tell me, or morse or sign: let me know they know where and how and why it hurts? Or something? What is the point of other people, being so separate, if we can’t help a person get that pain will stick its shiv into anything, just to get rid of the weapon and because it can? For if we share ourselves then they, too, must also be in so much pain. I can hear it. Oh, my loves. The wood of the crib, the white glow of the milk (which must have siphoned off the one and only pure part of me, leaving me with what, toxicity or sin or mush?), the awful softness. I’ve been melted into something too easy to spill. I make more and more of myself in order to make more and more of the baby. He takes it, this making. And somehow he’s made more of me, too. I’m a mother now. I run to the bathroom, run to the kitchen, run to the crib and I’m not even running. These places just scare up as needed, the wires that move my hands to the sink, to the baby, to the breast are electrical. I’m in shock. One must be in shock to say so, as if one’s own state is assessable, like a car accident or Minnesota taxes. A total disaster, this sack of liquid flesh which yowls and leaks and I’m talking about me not the baby. Me, this puddle of a middle, this utilized vessel, cracked hull, divine design. It’s how it works. It’s how we all got here. Deform following the function . . . But what about me? I whisper secretly and to think, around these parts used to be the joyful place of sex, what is now this intimate terror and squalor. My eyes burned out at three a.m. and again at six and eleven. This is why the clock is drowning, as I said earlier. I’m trying to explain it. I repeat myself, or haven’t I already? Tiny self, along with a tiny self. I’ll say it: he hurt me, this new babe, then and now. Perhaps he always will, though thoughts of the future seem like science fiction novels I never finished reading. Their ends like red nerves chopped off by cleaver, not aliens, this very moment, saving nothing for later. He howls with such fury and clarity I must believe him. No god has the power to make me believe anything, yet I happen to know this baby knows a way out. This dark hole closing in on me all around: he’ll show me how to get through the shock and the godlessness and the rictus of crushed flesh, into the rest of my life.

The economical ikebana of the lesser octopus is disarming, a sextopus, holding its intelligence & ink in a concentrate. Not some sloppy octopus who suddenly freaks, so princessy, rich. Driven to abstraction not unlike flowers dropping their petals because petals are garbage off the bloom, not expensive anymore thus going inside to find meaning. Cut the eyes, then, from the cruel ikebana of the racehorse— if a leg breaks she can't bear her own weight, long-blossomed head turns to glue and the fortune zooms off like flies from a carcass when shooed. The tripod fell so I had to cast about for my crutch to walk over—my bad left knee buckling— to right it. I want to take a picture of the flowers I arranged after an ikebana class, just one. I quit quickly but still hope to learn to arrange beauty classically. Maybe I'm lazy, or don't apply the rules to myself, or maybe "laze" is just "zeal" rearranged, as in my case. Even now, the clock we need to punch out on is too far away to plug in, so power collects in its hands.

I don’t like what the moon is supposed to do. Confuse me, ovulate me, spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient date-rape drug. So I’ll howl at you, moon, I’m angry. I’ll take back the night. Using me to swoon at your questionable light, you had me chasing you, the world’s worst lover, over and over hoping for a mirror, a whisper, insight. But you disappear for nights on end with all my erotic mysteries and my entire unconscious mind. How long do I try to get water from a stone? It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band. Better off alone. I’m going to write hard and fast into you, moon, face-fucking. Something you wouldn’t understand. You with no swampy sexual promise but what we glue onto you. That’s not real. You have no begging cunt. No panties ripped off and the crotch sucked. No lacerating spasms sending electrical sparks through the toes. Stars have those. What do you have? You’re a tool, moon. Now, noon. There’s a hero. The obvious sun, no bullshit, the enemy of poets and lovers, sleepers and creatures. But my lovers have never been able to read my mind. I’ve had to learn to be direct. It’s hard to learn that, hard to do. The sun is worth ten of you. You don’t hold a candle to that complexity, that solid craze. Like an animal carcass on the road at night, picked at by crows, taunting walkers and drivers. Your face regularly sliced up by the moving frames of car windows. Your light is drawn, quartered, your dreams are stolen. You change shape and turn away, letting night solve all night’s problems alone.

But unfortunately it can only travel into the future at a rate of one second per second, which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant committees and even to me. But I manage to get there, time after time, to the next moment and to the next. Thing is, I can't turn it off. I keep zipping ahead— well not zipping—And if I try to get out of this time machine, open the latch, I'll fall into space, unconscious, then desiccated! And I'm pretty sure I'm afraid of that. So I stay inside. There's a window, though. It shows the past. It's like a television or fish tank. But it's never live; it's always over. The fish swim in backward circles. Sometimes it's like a rearview mirror, another chance to see what I'm leaving behind, and sometimes like blackout, all that time wasted sleeping. Myself age eight, whole head burnt with embarrassment at having lost a library book. Myself lurking in a candled corner expecting to be found charming. Me holding a rose though I want to put it down so I can smoke. Me exploding at my mother who explodes at me because the explosion of some dark star all the way back struck hard at mother's mother's mother. I turn away from the window, anticipating a blow. I thought I'd find myself an old woman by now, traveling so light in time. But I haven't gotten far at all. Strange not to be able to pick up the pace as I'd like; the past is so horribly fast.

Stop belonging to me so much, face-head. Leave me to my child and my flowers. I can’t run with you hanging on to me like that. It’s like having ten dogs on a single lead and no talent for creatures. No hands, no trees. Not my dogs, nobody’s. Don’t you have a place to go, face-head? Deep into the brick basement of another life? To kill some time, I mean. That furnace light could take a shine to you. There are always places, none of them mine. And always time—rainbow sugar show of jimmies falling from ice cream’s sky— but that stuff’s extra, it’s never in supply. “Never,” however, acres of it. Violet beans and sarcasm. Too many flavors of it. All those prodigal particles, flimsily whimsical miracles, an embarrassment of glitches. The chorus just more us. But nowhere bare and slippery have I got a prayer. If I had two hands to rub together I wouldn’t waste the air.

I forgot how lush and electrified it was with you. The shaggy fragrant zaps continually passing back and forth, my fingertip to your clavicle, or your wrist rubbing mine to share gardenia oil. We so purred like dragonflies we kept the mosquitoes away and the conversation was heavy, mother-lacerated childhoods and the sad way we'd both been both ignored and touched badly. Knowing that being fierce and proud and out and loud was just a bright new way to be needy.Please listen to me, oh what a buzz!you're the only one I can tell. Even with no secret, I could come close to your ear with my mouth and that was ecstasy, too. We barely touched each other, we didn't have to speak. The love we made leapt to life like a cat in the space between us (if there ever was space between us), and looked back at us through fog. Sure, this was San Francisco, it was often hard to see. But fog always burned off, too, so we watched this creature to see if it knew what it was doing. It didn't.

Other weddings are so shrewd on the sofa, short and baffled, bassett-legged. All things knuckled, I have no winter left, in my sore rememory, to melt down for drinking water. Shrunk down. Your wedding slides the way wiry dark hairs do, down a swimming pool drain. So I am drained. Sincerely. I wish you every chapped bird on this pilgrimage to hold your hem up from the dust. Dust is plural: infinite dust. I will sink in the sun, I will crawl towards the heavy drawing and design the curtains in the room of never marrying you. Because it is a sinking, because today’s perfect weather is a later life’s smut. This soiled future unplans love. I keep unplanning the same Sunday. Leg and flower, breeze and terrier, I have no garden and couldn’t be happier. Please, don’t lose me here. I am sorry my clutch is all tendon and no discipline: the heart is a severed kind of muscle and alone. I can hear yours in your room. I hear mine in another room. In another’s.

It’s a wave, isn’t it? Not a particle. A fresh, cool wave, so why am I flushed and not washed? Why dirtier than before? 1. Etymology On the subject of our names. They’re so embracing, thinking they’re all us and swallowing themselves into our nausea. Yet we never quite die on the spot. We put off being what we’re called, we take the hint. Time is never wasted. It is always spent. 2. Teleology Sheer fabric trailing through 4 a.m. I thought it was opaque and earlier. 3. Mathematics I know you know I know. And the mirror multiplies inside. The world is no bigger, but next time do the math, because I wanted to know none of what I now know twice. 4. The Principle of the Borg Saying “There’s no one like me” accomplishes the exact opposite of what you mean. It is true only insofar as it is true for everyone equally. So it means you are not special in any way. Which should be enough for you. 5. Documentary This clothing, a maladaptive wrapping, cuts me up. I am a vignette, floated knowingly since I pulled myself through myself, like a unitard. Too many eyeholes have been cut and pieced together to make flesh less various with others. 6. Medicine The cure for embarrassment is substitution. Strap, don’t pluck. Baldness makes headlines. Use grass. Use less. Shorts under your skirt for recess. Redo the surfaces of your wrong turns to make taking them smoother in the future. 7. Cosmology Things are less embarrassing at the cellular level. Remember? We were a whole part of the universe before Mother busted the party. Before we were ourselves. Now, like dirty soap, we attract what we repel. 8. Apology Even the clumsiest fate is perfectly shaped, so the view took over looking but the sweetest thing I’ve ever known is obscene with a beautiful sugar rotted down to its truth. Loving you a serious accidental shame and day flatulates into night, trips and falls in front of millions into morning. In thrall to this pocus: the end of fear starts with such an annihilating blush, with such a stutter.

I’ll go anywhere to leave you but come with me. All the cities are like you anyway. Windows darken when I get close enough to see. Any place we want to stay’s polluted, the good spots taken already by those who ruin them. And restaurants we’d never find. We’d rut a ditch by a river in nights so long they must be cut by the many pairs of wrong-handled scissors maybe god owns and doesn’t share. I water god. I make a haunted lake and rinse and rinse. I take what I want, and have ever since what I want disappeared, like anything hunted. That’s what you said. Disappointment isn’t tender, dried and wide instead. The tourists snapped you crying, and the blanket I brought was so dirty it must have been lying around in lice and blood that whole year we fought. It wasn’t clear, so I forgot. I haven’t been sleeping, next to you twitching to bury my boring eyes. The ship made you sad, and the ferry, and canoe. All boats do.

Myself I'm like a dress my mother made me, a fabric self split open with a sigh as I grew and—bewildered or proud or full of rage—patched with nicer material than we'd had before. I got the sense it was all wasted on me. But a needle's sharp to pierce, is itself pierced—so as to sew like I was taught. Like I learned: no dress could ever be beautiful or best if it had me in it. I was the stain in a place we couldn't fix. Having fallen on a slicer of some kind. Double-seamed, scabbed over, a new body pocket in the pattern. How to stitch up that wound right into the clean vertical rip in some on-sale flannelette? I'd never again be cold. Skin's holey not holy. In mad winter alone with drink, I think: tattoo needles don't use thread but ink to mark a place in this ever-moving skin and that wound is ornament. But who needs a mark to know what's marked? I would pray to the dark in the dark. But what did I ask for, what did I know to ask for? Nonfatal wounds: they're there when we die, deliquescent, vibrating like a drum skin just after each beat moves off. A part of music. A way a body keeps time, is time's keeper, vigilant till time up and goes to find another body. Another's warmth and shelter. Or related injuries. Anyone who hurts another was hurt that same way, so how far back behind our backs do we go to finally find the first hurt; whose finger points to say, "You! You're the one who god knows why started a cycle of unending pain," to someone's child in short pants? A baby just torn a hole in her amnion swirl? And what of me? I can't tell where my flesh meets the rest of me, ragbag full of rags, shot full of holes but that's just the way cotton and silk and everything I said up till now looks when it hits the air and is cried on. I'm so inside out I evaporated entirely already as August does, my actual dress shredded at the seams— unsalvageable. Who would ever love me like this? And just like that, I stopped thinking about it. I agree to meet you at the ferry heading to a place neither of us wants to go but both just said sure, I'll go...if you want! We should turn back, nobody said. Oh we should before it's too late, nobody said again, insistent this time.