Eliza Griswold

My earliest wish was not to exist, to burst in the backyard without violence, no blood, no fleshy bits, mute button pressed alone behind the rectory where no one would see me. This wasn’t a plea to be found or mourned for, but to be unborn into the atmosphere. To hang in the humid air, as ponds vent upward from the overheated earth, rise until they freeze and crystallize, then drop into the aquifer.

My transgressions pile against the garden wall (built when Rome began to weaken, scarred by a cannonball.) I gossiped; I snubbed a dinner guest. I watch until the wall writhes with awful feral cats fed by shrunken widows and the odd librarian. I’ve begun to be depleted by your absence; one of  love’s worst symptoms. For years, I’d had the sense to hold myself apart. I’ve been here long enough to kill two mint plants and a lavender, then resurrect their better part. I’d like to let you die on the vine. Not you, the You I Dream, who follows through on waking. See how the watcher sees the storm but doesn’t get wet. Be that. Be what? Be wiser than the heart.

Do I still long for my virginity? — Fragment 107 I never longed for my virginity. I heard it on the radio after the hurricane. There, in the aftermath, was the voice of a man — once the sweet, screwed-up boy whose hooded, jessed spirit I tried to possess with the ruthlessness I mistook for power. Here he was on NPR, so gentle, so familiar with devastation, his timbre woke the teenage falconer in me who once saw his kindness as weakness, saw a boy as an unfledged goshawk — a creature to trap and be trapped with in darkened mews. I knew the rules: neither of us could sleep until the molting bird grew ravenous enough to take the raw mouse from my hand. Breaking the falcon broke us both, left us scared and less aware of  love than fear.

When you said no, I went for your dresser, opened the top drawer, broke the paper seals on the two sterile cups, and wiped my dirty thumbs inside. Because our stubborn love won’t die, I have to kill it, will it dead. Or so I thought until I passed a cycle on my own. You’ve no idea what’s grown inside me since I bled.

A spring day oozes through Trastevere. A nun in turquoise sneakers contemplates the stairs. Ragazzi everywhere, the pus in their pimples pushing up like paperwhites in the midday sun. Every hard bulb stirs. The fossilized egg in my chest cracks open against my will. I was so proud not to feel my heart. Waking means being angry. The dead man on the Congo road was missing an ear, which had either been eaten or someone was wearing it around his neck. The dead man looked like this. No, that. Here’s a flock of tourists in matching canvas hats. This year will take from me the hardened person who I longed to be. I am healing by mistake. Rome is also built on ruins.

Bastard, the other boys teased him, till Phaethon unleashed the steeds of Armageddon. He couldn’t hold their reins. Driving the sun too close to earth, the boy withered rivers, torched Eucalyptus groves, until the hills burst into flame, and the people’s blood boiled through the skin. Ethiopia, land of   burnt faces. In a boy’s rage for a name, the myth of race begins.

We meet midway to walk white cobbles under a fish-flesh gray sky. Europe is collapsing; we are collapsing always and again no matter how hard we love one another. I don’t understand our failure, where the feed loops back and spits us into another country, another junior suite reenacting this same, same beat of   a scene that begins, rises, never ends,always ends — Our intentions don’t meet, their courses set differently by a force you don’t believe in, could be as simple as life. I want to be the wife you don’t want. You won’t let go of my wrist. I resist, threaten, bully, acquiesce. We write the next act of The Alchemist in New York, Lisbon, a beach, a bar, star-crossed maybe from different galaxies. You approach, I retreat. You retreat, I reproach. The manic two-step jitters over North Africa’s dunes farther than our hero, Santiago, can see. I rise in the night to find the sharp knife that came with the pears as a courtesy.

The naked man in the caravan has peace of mind. He whose covering belongs to others is uncovered. He who has luck will have the winds blow him his firewood. He whose trousers are made of dry grass should not warm himself at the fire. He howled before going mad. He led the lion by the ear. Like the sparrow, he wanted to imitate the pigeon’s walk but lost his own. Walk with sandals till you get good shoes. Where the turban moves, there moves the territory. Men meet but mountains don’t. Always taking out without giving back, even the mountains will be broken down. Penny piled on penny will make a heap. Only the unlucky coin is left in the purse. As long as a human being lives he will learn. Learn to shave by shaving orphans. He who is to be hanged can insult the Pasha. In the house of a man who has been hanged don’t talk of rope. The small donkey is the one that everybody rides. Fish eat fish and he who has no might dies. My belly before my children.

The pack is filing from my nowheresvilles filling the halfway hotels, braving the ruts and calling one another via satellite. A dollar says hello. At home I try growing a new life, one of many women bored by my womb’s mystery. Who has time to run a thumb between her legs and calculate the temperature — chipper and bitter netherworld weathergirl.

You have a beautiful mouth, Luigi, the man-boy says. The rubber raft has floated far from shore. The choice is this: medusa sea, a boil of   jellied lashes, or face the kiss.