Joyce Peseroff

I'm selling my old rock records, the reggae and the Dead, the Beatles and bands no one heard after the Amazing Kathy Dalton became less so and Airto—busted for possession, his album's face behind ten fingers blacked with stationhouse ink— deported. A Stone retired, Mick past fifty, Van Morrison— composer of the world's best Celtic fuck music—gone spiritual, while "Peaceful Easy Feeling" sells Prozac, and the trippy paisley vinyl of Dave Mason's "Alone Together," Big Brother's funky R. Crumb cover (fat nipply Janis dragging that ball and chain) are quaint collectibles, like Fiestaware or bottles from defunct breweries; useful things no one uses anymore, worth money.

Thanks, no thanks, to eternal life. What pleasure watching my old house broken-beamed, grey elephant brought to its knees? White ash—gone the way of trilobites and horsehair fern, even the nuclear-proof cockroach in deep-freeze. Cueballs knock each other randomly; reverse. the tape and movement looks the same, illustrating the end of time: things happen, but don't matter. And if Lethe strips you like a swimmer from his trunks, where will "I" be? If Heaven without you is Hell, how will I know? A forever of no-never-mind does not appeal, God's heart a cold, contracting cinder. Give me the white light, the slit of split-second calm, and knowing over is over.

Dad didn't play the ponies or manic games at night; Mom was addicted only to her soaps. Sisters at war never swore. Silence was genius of an era, nothing personal. Our hidden grief shadowed the Fifties' sunshine like Eisenhower's speech against the military-industrial complex, like playground platoons still blowing up Japs. Thanksgiving comes late in this museum of childhood, flower painted at the bottom of a porcelain teacup: cracked saucer, no sugar, no milk.

The flowerets look edible before they open, like columns of sugar dots on tiny strips I bought as a child. Hard to bite the candy without some paper adhering, as adding machine tape will to large, red numbers. Lilacs are like that: another year unspools without major accomplishment, while I question "major" and "accomplishment." And when I find in Costco those clusters of pointillist pastel, I hope they will become someone else's nostalgia—honorable emotion propelling Ulysses toward Ithaca, and a woman to set lilacs in her dooryard as her mother did.

My mother's voice is at my throat —"Try a scarf in the neckline"— and on my lips: "Just a little lipstick." Today I'm wearing both. My "mother's voice," pitched high, carries reprimand and care: "No boom on the table!" My daughter swats me as I carry her away from the dearest activity on earth—sticks, stones, struck as if the coffee table were a flint. "Barbarian," I croon in heels. "What's that?" she asks and rips a nylon with a fingernail. She cries at the turtleneck pulled over her head. "I'll give you something to cry about!" I hush, succeeding for another day, or an hour—another minute late for work. Tonight I'll choose a lullaby: "Bluebird at my window," Mother sang to me, a voice that could broom sorrow through the door . . . A decal staggered on the painted bureau, blue wing seeking, finding no way out.

One morning you open one eye and listing to the south it bulks like a barn, noiseless, derelict planks horizontal and deeply grooved. A rudder the size of your front door pivots as you push. Once inside you can smell the fear of every winged, creeping and four-legged thing: no water, no straw, just shadow and bare wood. Where is the one promised to wake beside you forever? Ox-eyed daisies, goldenrod, clover— why are you breathing among them, why don't you gather the outcast beasts or become one...

1. It is cold enough for rain to coagulate and fall in heavy drops. Tonight a skin of ice will grow over the bones of the smallest bush, making it droop like the wrist of someone carrying a heavy suitcase. This moving on, from season to season, is exhausting and violent, the break from the Berlin Wall of winter especially. Like a frostbitten hand coming to life, I color first with warmth, then with pain. Thawing, letting the great powers go their own way, in rivers and in flesh, frightens me, as this day warns me of an icy night. 2. Each year I am astonished at the havoc wrought on other lives: fathers made tiny by cancer; a mother swollen around a bad heart "brought on by aggravation." To suffer is to do something new yet always the same— a change of life from the sexual dread. Some women wish they were men, some men wish they were dead; still, there is coin in suffering . . . It makes us rich as Croesus in his golden tears, and we are rarely hated for it. This coin I store in a purse made of my mother's milk and flesh, which God says I must not mix. I use it instead to seek pleasure. 3. Walking around with this thing in me all day, this loving cup full of jelly, waiting for you to come home—seven o'clock, eight o'clock, eight-thirty . . . What could be more important than love? I can't imagine; you can. Not a good day, not about to get better. 4. The bird comes complete with heart, liver, and neck-bone wrapped chastely in white paper. Still half-frozen, the legs are hard to separate. Inside, wax paper sticks to the ribs. I reach like a vet delivering pigs, or a boy finger-fucking a virgin. 5. Air the same sweet temperature inside the house as outside the house. Stepping up from the cellar with an armful of sheets, I listen for the dirge of flies under the chittering birds, both painfully loud. There is a stridency that's stubborn in a life grown by inches: the fat little fingers of buds bursting; ugly ducklings; the slow war of day against night. As I pin the swelling sheets with clothespins damp and too narrow at the mouth, I wonder how flies know to come out to feed the birds, and feast themselves on the new stillborn, this stubborn great chain of being.