Patricia Lockwood

Is worth any number of old ladies. A grandmother hung from a cliff like a tense moment in an action movie and the Ode, speaking itself with its hand on one heart, steadfastly refused to save her, in fact it did that thing where it ground each finger out with a motorcycle boot and then ate its cigarette for emphasis, whooping; some old-ass bitch was in pussy church when the Öde, now spelling itself with an umlaut, swung its urn at the back of her head, really clocking her; till the violets in her church hat grew from the floor and won a third-place prize for consciousness; the Ode is pushing nanas off bridges, detonating them with dynamite, tying them to railroad tracks with squeaky young rope, pouring big glugs into them out of the skull-and-crossbones bottle, the Ode is checking its pocketwatch, which points always to death-to-old-ladies o’clock, it is shrieking ugh you’re like one hundred and your breath smells exactly like horse medicine ho , the Ode is blasting holes in them, is laying them out in the potpourri aisle, is stabbing them with those icicles they always said were dangerous, the Ode means ill to all of them, the Ode is worth any number    ... and the worst is I believe it. The worst is I will become one, without having written anything like the Ode on a Grecian Urn, and sit in long rows along with my kind, till there the Ode comes striding toward me, my necessary death at the ready, my pulse like black grapes at its fingertips, saying, “Fear not, it will be fast, the forgetting of great poems will fly through you in bullets”; beauty is truth, and truth    ... but already I am losing it, all I know is that the world is falling away, and you won’t believe what it is wearing, the ridiculous pantsuit of me, a old lady, crumpled hopelessly at the crotch, a flower valiant in its little butthole — all the vital syllables are being erased — its space-age fabric now seen for what it is: an embarrassment, my name is turning into Edna, Myrtle, Dorcas, my descendants find my peppermints disgusting, the urn is approaching to scatter me over a landscape that is heaven on earth, and in the feet of the poem I am running — in mad pursuit, and struggle to escape — chased as if I am worth one million, Pearl, Opal, Ruby, Coral, until I am caught by the feeble arm, and because it is true I am telling the Ode: you stood in me like a spine, put poppies behind my eyes, just the fact of you, that he took one raw spring to set you down instead of going out to tip heifers, tweak noses, or sexually harass huge curvy vases, you were for me too, though they would trade me in all my Beulahs, have lined me up to enter that land in my turn, you let me memorize your most satiny parts and repeat them in hospital waiting rooms, first to myself, and then almost out loud, mine, mine, the world’s, all mine, something to say in the face of tall sickness as I quietly try to unwrap hard candies, as I tug down tissues from my sleeve, because it is true I am telling you, Ode, that I had a throat and you boiled in it, and the Ode is murmuring almost gently, “But do you like my ending? Some people don’t like my ending,” I don’t, I never did, I thought it was so overwrought, though now that I’m here myself why not if it has to be this way then better put a bright red cough on all that white

I was so happy in the gem room. The sun was president, I was just dug up, all hell had shrunk to a sulphur crystal. Something danced on the point; it must have been me. I had a hundred faces, and one of them served up the ceiling in a perfect slice — like a twelve-year-old saint in some countryside where they only read Revelation. I had some small nugget of sense, for once, I was a mind that understood the light    ... Rain rained in my aquamarine. The world’s knuckles gripped the bedstead. I felt the red dynamiting of me in Missouri, where all outdoors was my candy store, where color sucked at its all-day self and never became less sweet, less new. “I want to put it in my mouth,” said someone, “I almost want to eat it    ...    ” I had dozens of uses, but I was mostly flat beautiful. Visitors just gasped in the matte-black room where I freely fluoresced. They saw me laid on a dictionary to demonstrate my transparency, which was complete; they could read the word everything through me. My name meant blood, meant seawater, meant lemon. The eye in my agate never blinked. I was believed to be formed of frozen moonlight. I was cut so that a star shone back. The purest and wind-clearest hunk of me they carved into a horse. When I was split to the purple and somehow still standing, they called me a cathedral. Yet just to the left of that I spilled all over velvet. The velvet is what did it — I wanted to be smuggled. Wanted to ride past all the alarms, just before that drop of sweat hit the floor. Wanted to end up in god- knows-whose hands, a heist. “Obscene,” said a man behind me, “just in piles like that    ...    obscene.” Then I spilled another carat, laughing. In Missouri you could pluck me straight up off the ground. Gumdrops, gobstoppers, jujubes. I thought: try to suck me down to nothing, and find yourself up against one million years. In piles like that. Just out there. For anyone. Obscene. The legs of the real thing were opening, flash and flash and flash. I said: go ahead and smash the glass. Give me a break-in like a kaleidoscope. Someone will entirely drip with me as soon as I get out of here.

I was born as a woman, I talk you to death, or else your ear off, or else you to sleep. What do I have, all the time in the world, and a voice that swings brass back and forth, you can hear it, and a focal point where my face should be. What do I have, I have absolute power, and what I want is your money, your drool, and your mind, and the sense of myself as a snake, and a garter in the grass. Every bone in the snake is the hipbone, every part of the snake is the hips. The first sound I make is silence, then sssssshhh, the first word I say is listen. Sheep shearers and accountants hypnotize the hardest, and lookout sailors who watch the sea, and the boys who cut and cut and cut and cut and cut the grass. The writers who write page-turners, and the writers who repeat themselves. The diamond-cutter kneels down before me and asks me to hypnotize him, and I glisten at him and glisten hard, and listen to me and listen, I tell him. Count your age backward, I tell him. Become aware of your breathing, and aware of mine which will go on longer. Believe you are a baby till I tell you otherwise, then believe you’re a man till I tell you you’re dirt. When a gunshot rings out you’ll lie down like you’re dead. When you hear, “He is breathing,” you’ll stand up again. The best dog of the language is Yes and protects you. The best black-and-white dog of the language is Yes and goes wherever you go, and you go where I say, you go anywhere. Why do I do it is easy, I am working my way through school. Give me the money for Modernism, and give me the money for what comes next. When you wake to the fact that you have a body, you will wake to the fact that not for long. When you wake you will come when you read the word hard, or hard to understand me, or impenetrable poetry. When you put down the book you will come when you hear the words put down the book, you will come when you hear.

The government spent a Patricia on me, “a huge waste,” it lamented, “when we could have been spending it on another Nixon,” the government spent all its beauty on the great light leap on the deer- crossing sign — there was hardly any beauty left for anything else in America, and looking around them the government said, “Is there none left? Print more,” you are born, you barely contain yourself, you grow, inside you, someone spends a billion to make prison more luxurious; inside you, someone spends a billion to keep libraries open one hour later; then oh god, you feel wonderful, you must be on welfare, the government spent its whole education on me, at least that is how it feels right now, I am bursting with educational dollars, I am bursting with other dollars as well, I’m rounded up, I’m one long row of ohs, I get so many commas that the sentence doesn’t stop, the dollars in me are a map of  Missouri my mother can’t fold back up, oh no the map is everywhere, but I know the way, I am hot on a trail, I am bursting with the dollars that put that knowing breath in drug dogs, all the spending of  the space program is in me, the stars seem especially close, this is because they are a government handout, they are spending millions on moonlight research, when I am President I will cut the arts and let my right arm flow downhill, I am ready, there is nothing trivial about me left, I am eliminating the penny every second, a dollar is peeled off a roll of  thousands, it is the day, the mint of  it is in my mouth, I open it, completely fresh.

Must be entered through the sharpener every Sunday, else your name will be lovingly written in the Book of the Down Arrow. The One Steeple to Every Church rule breaks in half in the Church of the Open Crayon Box; the One Bell to Every Steeple rule breaks off its tip. “Climb stairs to the steeples,” the preacher commands, “and let every belltone ring out!” You can see the whole town from the steeple, and you exit the church through the view, and you walk through what calls itself Flagpole—the town is a blot on the town, but the railroad is coming out this way and we must give them a smear to see through the windows: now you pass the General Store, that even your vaguest stick figure can enter, now you pass a vacant lot: the post office isn’t here yet, is only a set-aside space in the center of the country’s envelope; now you pass the voting- place, where we stuff our handwriting through a slit. Tall trees fall in the pinewoods, tall telegraph poles are raised, and words inch along our wires: text text text stop, text text text stop. And now you pass the Feed Store, which sells carrot and turnip and sugar-beet tops—only the visible parts—and now Whitey BaLavender’s Hardware, where everything hangs off the hook of its color, or color hangs off the hook of its all, where you work your hands into cool washers, and work hands into nailheads of the color blue, and watch Whitey BaLavender busy himself pouring crayons into bullet molds. You show him a list that says “ax,” and he sells you a red line through it. All up and down Main Street ponies are covered with strokes as coarse as horse blankets. And once you have drawn the ponies you begin to draw the saddle shop, you grip the right color like a saddle horn and somehow keep from falling off, and you ride to the edge of town, where you draw the fur trading post, where they sell tails of any shy animal, the rest of the animal gone down a hole, where you trade in your skin for a possibles bag and wear possibles bag where your skin was. Fat geese fly in any letter you like but you need red meat for once, and write a splayed- hide word like “Deerslayer,” and take hold of the ending and drag it home, and now you are almost there, now you are building the home with hand-drawn Log Cabin Font, you are building it log by log of course and smoothing the logs with a color called Adze, you are biting the crayon to notch the logs and driving in dots of nailheads. Stumps of umber surround you, and the sky is beginning to look like sky. You are hoping a man can be really alone here; you are hoping your father can tell what it is; and now only the doorknob is left to draw and in your enthusiasm you shout at the paper, and the weather changes just in time, not raining, beginning to spit.

Of all living monuments has the fewest facts attached to it, they slide right off its surface, no Lincoln lap for them to sit on and no horse to be astride. Here is what I know for sure: Was a gift from one city to another. A city cannot travel to another city, a city cannot visit any city but itself, and in its sadness it gives away a great door in the air. Well a city cannot except for Paris, who puts on a hat styled with pigeon wings and walks through the streets of another city and will not even see the sights, too full she is of the sights already. And within her walk her women, and the women of Paris looking like they just walked through an Arch... Or am I mixing it up I think I am with another famous female statue? Born in its shadow and shook-foil hot the facts slid off me also. I and the Arch we burned to the touch. “Don’t touch that Arch a boy we know got third-degree burns from touch- ing that Arch,” says my mother sitting for her statue. She is metal on a hilltop and so sad she isn’t a Cross. She was long ago given to us by Ireland. What an underhand gift for an elsewhere to give, a door that reminds you you can leave it. She raises her arm to brush my hair. Oh no female armpit lovelier than the armpit of the Arch.