April to May

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.