May Swenson

Women                                 Or they should be                              should be pedestals                              little horses moving                                 those wooden pedestals                              sweet moving                                 oldfashioned to the                                    painted motions                                 rocking of men                                  horses the gladdest things in the toyroom The                                       feelingly pegs                                     and then of their                                 unfeelingly ears                                     To be so familiar                            joyfully and dear                               ridden to the trusting                      rockingly fists                                    ridden until To be chafed                        the restored egos dismount and the legs stride away Immobile                            willing sweetlipped                         to be set sturdy                                 into motion and smiling                         Women women                                 should be should always                        pedestals be waiting                              to men

Stone gullets among       Inrush       Feed         Backsuck and The borders swallow            Outburst             Huge engorgements       Swallow In gulps the sea      Tide crams jagged         Smacks snorts chuckups       Follow In urgent thirst      Jaws the hollow      Insurge       Hollow Gushing evacuations follow       Jetty it must       Outpush       Greed

I show her how to put her arms around me, but she’s much too small. What’s worse, she doesn’t understand. And although she lies beside me, sticking out her tongue, it’s herself she licks. She likes my stroking hand. And even lets me kiss. But at my demand: “Now, do it to me, like this,” she backs off with a hiss. What’s in her little mind? Jumping off the bed, she shows me her behind, but curls up on the rug instead. I beg her to return. At first, she did, then went and hid under the covers. She’s playing with my feet! “Oh, Boa, come back. Be sweet, Lie against me here where I’m nice and warm. Settle down. Don’t claw, don’t bite. Stay with me tonight.” Seeming to consent, she gives a little whine. Her deep, deep pupils meet mine with a look that holds a flood ... But not my brand. Not at all. And, what‘s worse, she’s much too small.

Body my house my horse my hound what will I do when you are fallen Where will I sleep How will I ride What will I hunt Where can I go without my mount all eager and quick How will I know in thicket ahead is danger or treasure when Body my good bright dog is dead How will it be to lie in the sky without roof or door and wind for an eye With cloud for shift how will I hide?

1 A smudge for the horizon that, on a clear day, shows the hard edge of hills and buildings on the other coast. Anchored boats all head one way: north, where the wind comes from. You can see the storm inflating out of the west. A dark hole in gray cloud twirls, widens, while white rips multiply on the water far out. Wet tousled yellow leaves, thick on the slate terrace. The jay’s hoarse cry. He’s stumbling in the air, too soaked to fly. 2 Knuckles of the rain on the roof, chuckles into the drain- pipe, spatters on the leaves that litter the grass. Melancholy morning, the tide full in the bay, an overflowing bowl. At least, no wind, no roughness in the sky, its gray face bedraggled by its tears. 3 Peeling a pear, I remember my daddy’s hand. His thumb (the one that got nipped by the saw, lacked a nail) fit into the cored hollow of the slippery half his knife skinned so neatly. Dad would pare the fruit from our orchard in the fall, while Mother boiled the jars, prepared for “putting up.” Dad used to darn our socks when we were small, and cut our hair and toenails. Sunday mornings, in pajamas, we’d take turns in his lap. He’d help bathe us sometimes. Dad could do anything. He built our dining table, chairs, the buffet, the bay window seat, my little desk of cherry wood where I wrote my first poems. That day at the shop, splitting panel boards on the electric saw (oh, I can hear the screech of it now, the whirling blade that sliced my daddy’s thumb), he received the mar that, long after, in his coffin, distinguished his skilled hand. 4 I sit with braided fingers and closed eyes in a span of late sunlight. The spokes are closing. It is fall: warm milk of light, though from an aging breast. I do not mean to pray. The posture for thanks or supplication is the same as for weariness or relief. But I am glad for the luck of light. Surely it is godly, that it makes all things begin, and appear, and become actual to each other. Light that’s sucked into the eye, warming the brain with wires of color. Light that hatched life out of the cold egg of earth. 5 Dark wild honey, the lion’s eye color, you brought home from a country store. Tastes of the work of shaggy bees on strong weeds, their midsummer bloom. My brain’s electric circuit glows, like the lion’s iris that, concentrated, vibrates while seeming not to move. Thick transparent amber you brought home, the sweet that burns. 6 “The very hairs of your head are numbered,” said the words in my head, as the haircutter snipped and cut, my round head a newel poked out of the tent top’s slippery sheet, while my hairs’ straight rays rained down, making pattern on the neat vacant cosmos of my lap. And maybe it was those tiny flies, phantoms of my aging eyes, seen out of the sides floating (that, when you turn to find them full face, always dissolve) but I saw, I think, minuscule, marked in clearest ink, Hairs #9001 and #9002 fall, the cut-off ends streaking little comets, till they tumbled to confuse with all the others in their fizzled heaps, in canyons of my lap. And what keeps asking in my head now that, brushed off and finished, I’m walking in the street, is how can those numbers remain all the way through, and all along the length of every hair, and even before each one is grown, apparently, through my scalp? For, if the hairs of my head are numbered, it means no more and no less of them have ever, or will ever be. In my head, now cool and light, thoughts, phantom white flies, take a fling: This discovery can apply to everything. 7 Now and then, a red leaf riding the slow flow of gray water. From the bridge, see far into the woods, now that limbs are bare, ground thick-littered. See, along the scarcely gliding stream, the blanched, diminished, ragged swamp and woods the sun still spills into. Stand still, stare hard into bramble and tangle, past leaning broken trunks, sprawled roots exposed. Will something move?—some vision come to outline? Yes, there— deep in—a dark bird hangs in the thicket, stretches a wing. Reversing his perch, he says one “Chuck.” His shoulder-patch that should be red looks gray. This old redwing has decided to stay, this year, not join the strenuous migration. Better here, in the familiar, to fade.

She sat on a shelf, her breasts two bellies on her poked-out belly, on which the navel looked like a sucked-in mouth— her knees bent and apart, her long left arm raised, with the large hand knuckled to a bar in the ceiling— her right hand clamping the skinny infant to her chest— its round, pale, new, soft muzzle hunting in the brown hair for a nipple, its splayed, tiny hand picking at her naked, dirty ear. Twisting its little neck, with tortured, ecstatic eyes the size of lentils, it looked into her severe, close-set, solemn eyes, that beneath bald eyelids glared—dull lights in sockets of leather. She twitched some chin-hairs, with pain or pleasure, as the baby-mouth found and yanked at her nipple; its pink-nailed, jointless fingers, wandering her face, tangled in the tufts of her cliffy brows. She brought her big hand down from the bar with pretended exasperation unfastened the little hand, and locked it within her palm— while her right hand with snag-nailed forefinger and short, sharp thumb, raked the new orange hair of the infant’s skinny flank— and found a louse, which she lipped, and thoughtfully crisped between broad teeth. She wrinkled appreciative nostrils which, without a nose, stood open—damp holes above the poke of her mouth. She licked her lips, flicked her leather eyelids— then, suddenly flung up both arms and grabbed the bars overhead. The baby's scrabbly fingers instantly caught the hair— as if there were metal rings there— in her long, stretched armpits. And, as she stately swung, and then proudly, more swiftly slung herself from corner to corner of her cell— arms longer than her round body, short knees bent— her little wild-haired, poke-mouthed infant hung, like some sort of trophy, or decoration, or shaggy medal— shaped like herself—but new, clean, soft and shining on her chest.

The flag is folded lengthwise, and lengthwise again, folding toward the open edge, so that the union of stars on the blue field remains outward in full view; a triangular folding is then begun at the striped end, by bringing the corner of the folded edge to the open edge; the outer point, turned inward along the open edge, forms the next triangular fold: the folding continued so, until the end is reached, the final corner tucked between the folds of the blue union, the form of the folded flag is found to resemble that of a 3-cornered pouch, or thick cocked hat. Take this flag, John Glenn, instead of a friend; instead of a brother, Edward Kennedy, take this flag; instead of a father, Joe Kennedy, take this flag; this flag instead of a husband, Ethel Kennedy, take this flag; this 9-times-folded red-white-striped, star-spotted-blue flag, tucked and pocketed neatly, Nation, instead of a leader, take this folded flag. Robert Kennedy, coffin without coverlet, beside this hole in the grass, beside your brother, John Kennedy, in the grass, take, instead of a country, this folded flag; Robert Kennedy, take this hole in the grass.

The popcorn is greasy, and I forgot to bring a Kleenex. A pill that’s a bomb inside the stomach of a man inside The Embassy blows up. Eructations of flame, luxurious cauliflowers giganticize into motion. The entire 29-ft. screen is orange, is crackling flesh and brick bursting, blackening, smithereened. I unwrap a Dentyne and, while jouncing my teeth in rubber tongue-smarting clove, try with the 2-inch-wide paper to blot butter off my fingers. A bubble-bath, room-sized, in which 14 girls, delectable and sexless, twist-topped Creamy Freezes (their blond, red, brown, pinkish, lavendar or silver wiglets all screwed that high, and varnished), scrub-tickle a lone male, whose chest has just the right amount and distribu- tion of curly hair. He’s nervously pretending to defend his modesty. His crotch, below the waterline, is also below the frame—but unsubmerged all 28 slick foamy boobs. Their makeup fails to let the girls look naked. Caterpil- lar lashes, black and thick, lush lips glossed pink like the gum I pop and chew, contact lenses on the eyes that are mostly blue, they’re nose-perfect replicas of each other. I’ve got most of the grease off and onto this little square of paper. I’m folding it now, making creases with my nails.

He looked down at his withering body and saw a hair near his navel, swaying. And now he saw his other hairs rise up. He felt a hectic current in his veins. Looking within, he saw the bubbling of his blood. He cursed his fever, saying: “It is the chemistry of prayer. It increases in frequency, seeding panic to all my being. My cells swell with the liquid of guilt they fabricate, juices of hatred eat my belly my corpuscles make war in me as they devour each other. My head heats in the combustion of anxiety, I am polluted by the secretions of my soul’s decay, while my brain wears away with the scratching night and day on the encephalograph of prayer. I grow monstrous with the leukemia of the world.” And he heard the hair say: “Hear me.” And he saw it grow gray as it waved. All his hairs he saw whiten, and, numberless, wilt from their erect electric listening. He saw them topple from their roots. “How dare you!” he cursed them. There surged a brief resuscitation to his body. His heart took heart and pounded twice with the health of fear But then the plague of prayer redoubled and overwhelmed him. In his feebleness he raged, and said: “I will tear out this evil and free it.” With his withered hands he tore the remaining hairs from his body and head. With his nails he opened his breast, and with his fist he exploded his heart, which erupted, a black and red volcano. As his brain tasted, for the first time, the birth of his doom, he came a rolling tide, a floating mountain of ecstasy. “I see you! I love you!” his eyes cried, overflowing with his bright blood. “You were the light of the world that are now my gushing tears— the kind and fiery tears of chaos, that wash my eyes with the cure of oblivion.” “He hears us!” cried his sick blood pouring from his ears. “Even as of old he heard our hair before it perished.” With his last strength, the chemistry of prayer, a few drops of his blood coagulated. That clot whirled out, free, in the vortex of the universe.

Beards of   water some of them have. Others are blowing whistles of   water. Faces astonished that constant   water jumps from their mouths. Jaws of lions are snarling   water through green teeth over chins of moss. Dolphins toss jets of   water from open snouts to an upper theater of   water. Children are riding swans and   water coils from the S-shaped necks and spills in flat foils from pincered bills. A solemn curly-headed bull puts out a swollen tongue of   water. Cupids naked are making   water into a font that never is full. A goddess is driving a chariot through   water. Her reins and whips are tight white   water. Bronze hoofs of horses wrangle with   water. Marble faces half hidden in leaves. Faces whose hair is leaves and grapes of stone are peering from living leaves. Faces with mossy lips unlocked always uttering   water, water wearing their features blank their ears deaf, their eyes mad or patient or blind or astonished at   water always uttered out of their mouths.