478 Identity poems

In the green rags of the Bible I tore up The straight silk of childhood on my head I left the house, I fled My mother’s brow where I had no ambition But to stroke the writing I raked in. She who dressed in wintersilk my head That month when there is baize on the high wall Where the dew cloud presses its lustration, And the thrush is but a brooch of rain As the world flies softly in the wool of heaven. I was a guest at my own youth; under The lamp tossed by a moth for thirteen winters Sentenced to cabbage and kisses By She who crammed an Earth against my feet and Pulled over me the bright rain Storm of fleece. Not for me – citizenship of the backdoor Where even the poor wear wings; while on Sunday Gamy ventilations raise their dilettante In the bonnet of the satin-green dung fly, And fungus sweats a livery of epaulettes. I was a hunter whose animal Is that dark hour when the hemisphere moves In deep blue blaze of dews And you, brunette of the birdmusic tree, Stagger in spat diamonds Drunkenly. Like some Saint whose only blasphemy is a Magnificent juice vein that plucks his groin With April’s coarse magicianship as green As the jade squirt of fruit, I was the child whose breast Rocks to a muscle savage as Africa. Thundercloud, your wool was rough with mud As the coat of a wild beast on which flowers grow, Your brogue of grunts so low They left soil in the mouth. After you, I Walked as through a Djinn’s brain Gleaming lane. I was incriminated by your hammer In my chest. And forfeit to the crepe hoods Of my mother’s eyes; the iron door of her oven And her church. Skies, cut to blind, had but laid on Her priest’s mouth the green scabs of winter. But I had the marvellous infection! Leaning upon my fairy and my dog In the ultramarine Latitudes of dew shook like a tear that’s carried Through darkness on the knuckles of A woman’s glove. I saw each winter where my hen-thrush Left her fork in famine’s white banqueting cloth; Could I not read as well the tradesman’s hand With its magenta creases – whose soul turns blandly On a sirloin mattress to smile at the next meal? O She who would paper her lamp with my wings! That hour when all the Earth is drinking the Blue drop of thunder; and in Dark debris as of a magician’s room, my beast A scented breathing To the East.

What I want most is what I deeply fear: loss of self; yet here I stand, a “memsahib,” all decked out in wonder, and still a stranger amid the harvest, old gaffar at my side. Here’s a pandit preaching in the flower stall: he turns funeral wreaths into wheels of rapture. I must shrug off my notion of knowing anything of substance about the world, about the spirit. Sparrows dart between the columns like music. Huge pupae, bananas split their golden skins; flies moisten their hands in bands of dew. Lepers limp by on crutches, in slow motion. Where is there order in the world? None, none, I think—no order, only spirals of power. The pyramids of onion, guava, melon—all defy my reason: they shine like galaxy-driven planets. A balancing scale becomes a barge of plenty, a cornucopia endlessly filling up and emptying. The wages of sin are more sin: virtue’s wages, more virtue—and all such earnings, weightless. I’ve forgotten my errand; I float now through myself like a howl through a phantom mouth— the world’s an illusory marketplace where I must bargain hardest for what I hope I’m worth.

Or is it a poor trait I am a parasite I lift off the wings of others

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea, London has swept about you this score years And bright ships left you this or that in fee: Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things, Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price. Great minds have sought you — lacking someone else. You have been second always. Tragical? No. You preferred it to the usual thing: One dull man, dulling and uxorious, One average mind —   with one thought less, each year. Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit Hours, where something might have floated up. And now you pay one.   Yes, you richly pay. You are a person of some interest, one comes to you And takes strange gain away: Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion; Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two, Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else That might prove useful and yet never proves, That never fits a corner or shows use, Or finds its hour upon the loom of days: The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work; Idols and ambergris and rare inlays, These are your riches, your great store; and yet For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things, Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff: In the slow float of differing light and deep, No! there is nothing! In the whole and all, Nothing that's quite your own. Yet this is you.

I think I know what sort of person I am. But then I think, But this stranger will imagine me quite otherwise when he or she hears this or that to my credit, for instance that I have a position at the university: the fact that I have a position at the university will appear to mean that I must be the sort of person who has a position at the university. But then I have to admit, with surprise, that, after all, it is true that I have a position at the university. And if it is true, then perhaps I really am the sort of person you imagine when you hear that a person has a position at the university. But, on the other hand, I know I am not the sort of person I imagine when I hear that a person has a position at the university. Then I see what the problem is: when others describe me this way, they appear to describe me completely, whereas in fact they do not describe me completely, and a complete description of me would include truths that seem quite incompatible with the fact that I have a position at the university.

Nervy, sparrow-like, Eyes Cherokee, Blackberry black, Arrow-quick, Picky eater, Lean in spirit, Converted Quaker, She taught her grandson Arithmetic And checkers tactics And let him touch Through her cotton nightie Small, tense nipples. Her hands, arthritic, Knitted doilies, Breaded tomatoes, And put up apples, While the hoarded guilts Made for bright quilts, The torrid migraines’ Counterpanes.

The skin ripples over my body like moon-wooed water, rearing to escape me. Where could it find another animal as naked as the one it hates to cover? Once it told me what was happening outside, who was attacking, who caressing, and what the air was doing to feed or freeze me. Now I wake up dark at night, in a textureless ocean of ignorance, or fruit bites back and water bruises like a stone. It’s jealousy, because I look for other tools to know with, and other armor, better girded to my wish. So let it lie, turn off the clues or try to leave: sewn on me seamless like those painful shirts the body-hating saints wore, the sheath of hell is pierced to my darkness nonetheless: what traitors labor in my face, what hints they smuggle through its arching guard! But even in the night it jails, with nothing but its lies and silences to feed upon, the jail itself can make a scenery, sing prison songs, and set off fireworks to praise a homemade day.

The age of portrait is drugged. Beauty is symmetry so rare it’s a mystery. My left eye is smaller than my right, my big mouth shows my nice teeth perfectly aligned like Muslims in prayer. My lips an accordion. Each sneeze a facial thumbprint. One corner of my mouth hangs downward when I want to hold a guffaw hostage. Bell’s palsy perhaps or what Mark Twain said about steamboat piloting, that a doctor’s unable to look upon the blush in a young beauty’s face without thinking it could be a fever, a malar rash, a butterfly announcing a wolf. Can I lie facedown now as cadavers posed on first anatomy lesson? I didn’t know mine was a woman until three weeks later we turned her over. Out of reverence there was to be no untimely exposure of donors, our patrons who were covered in patches of scrubs-green dish towels, and by semester’s end we were sick of all that, tossed mega livers and mammoth hearts into lab air and caught them. My body was Margaret. That’s what the death certificate said when it was released before finals. The cause of her death? Nothing memorable, frail old age. But the colonel on table nineteen with an accessory spleen had put a bullet through his temple, a final prayer. Not in entry or exit were there skull cracks to condemn the house of death, no shattered glass in the brain, only a smooth tunnel of deep violet that bloomed in concentric circles. The weekends were lonely. He had the most beautiful muscles of all 32 bodies that were neatly arranged, zipped up as if a mass grave had been disinterred. Or when unzipped and facing the ceiling had cloth over their eyes as if they’d just been executed. Gray silver hair, chiseled countenance, he was sixty-seven, a veteran of more than one war. I had come across that which will end me, ex- tend me, at least once, without knowing it.

He plays a train. She plays a whistle. They move away. He plays a rope. She plays a tree. They swing. He plays a dream. She plays a feather. They fly. He plays a general. She plays people. They declare war.

I Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough, Atop on the topmost twig, — which the pluckers forgot, somehow, — Forget it not, nay; but got it not, for none could get it till now. II Like the wild hyacinth flower which on the hills is found, Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound, Until the purple blossom is trodden in the ground.