478 Identity poems

In a light chocolatine room with blackout windows, a loud clock drowns in soft dawn’s syllables, crisscrossed with a broken cloudiness I’d choose as my own bedcovers but cannot. My choice of sleep or sky has no music of its own. There’s no “its own” while the baby cries. Oh, the baby cries. He howls and claws like a wrongly minor red wolf who doesn’t know his mother. I know I am his mother, but I can’t quite click on the word’s essential aspects, can’t denude the flora or disrobe the kind of housecoat “mother” always is. Something cunty, something used. Whatever meaning the word itself is covering, like underwear, that meaning is so mere and meager this morning. Mother. Baby. Chicken and egg. It’s so obnoxious of me: I was an egg who had  an egg and now I’m a chicken, as usual scooping up both possibilities, or what I used to call possibilities. I used to be this way, so ontologically greedy, wanting to be it all. Serves me right. My belief in the fluidity of the self turns out to mean my me is a flow of wellwater, without the well, or the bucket, a hole dug and seeping. A kind of unwell, where the ground reabsorbs what it was displaced to give. The drain gives meaning to the sieve. As I said: a chicken who still wants to be all potential. Someone who springs and falls, who cannot see how many of us I have in me—and I do not like them all. Do I like us? Can I love us? If anyone comes first it’s him, but how can that be? I was here way, way first. I have the breasts, godawful, and he the lungs and we share the despair. For we are a we, aren’t we? We split a self in such a way that there isn’t enough for either of us. The father of the baby is sleepy and present in his way, in the way of fathers. He is devoted like few fathers, and maybe hurts like I hurt, like no fathers. I don’t know what someone else feels, not even these someones who are also me. Do they hurt like I do?  Why can’t they tell me, or morse or sign: let me know they know where and how and why it hurts? Or something? What is the point of other people, being so separate, if we can’t help a person get that pain will stick its shiv into anything, just to get rid of the weapon and because it can? For if we share ourselves then they, too, must also be in so much pain. I can hear it. Oh, my loves. The wood of the crib, the white glow of the milk (which must have siphoned off the one and only pure part of me, leaving me with what, toxicity or sin or mush?), the awful softness. I’ve been melted into something too easy to spill. I make more and more of myself in order to make more and more of the baby. He takes it, this making. And somehow he’s made more of me, too. I’m a mother now. I run to the bathroom, run to the kitchen, run to the crib and I’m not even running. These places just scare up as needed, the wires that move my hands to the sink, to the baby, to the breast are electrical. I’m in shock. One must be in shock to say so, as if one’s own state is assessable, like a car accident or Minnesota taxes. A total disaster, this sack of liquid flesh which yowls and leaks and I’m talking about me not the baby. Me, this puddle of a middle, this utilized vessel, cracked hull, divine design. It’s how it works. It’s how we all got here. Deform following the function . . . But what about me? I whisper secretly and to think, around these parts used to be the joyful place of sex, what is now this intimate terror and squalor. My eyes burned out at three a.m. and again at six and eleven. This is why the clock is drowning, as I said earlier. I’m trying to explain it. I repeat myself, or haven’t I already? Tiny self, along with a tiny self. I’ll say it: he hurt me, this new babe, then and now. Perhaps he always will, though thoughts of the future seem like science fiction novels I never finished reading. Their ends like red nerves chopped off by cleaver, not aliens, this very moment, saving nothing for later. He howls with such fury and clarity I must believe him. No god has the power to make me believe anything, yet I happen to know this baby knows a way out. This dark hole closing in on me all around: he’ll show me how to get through the shock and the godlessness and the rictus of crushed flesh, into the rest of my life.

For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children’s mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours; For those of us who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk for by this weapon this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us For all of us this instant and this triumph We were never meant to survive. And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.

1 No one felt in the dark for his hat. No one budged an inch. Thus the story draws to its end. No one felt over the edge of her silk pocket to touch her parking ticket. No one even wished to walk out of the dark to the street. 2 Over the transparent page I traced my name. I thought about The Bird That Turns Around, How To Blow A Brick Over, What To Do While Waiting For The Doctor, Answers To Problems On Page 2,000, The Chair That Comes To You, The Mysterious Paper Purse, The Universe Around Us,Lift To Erase. 3 Those days everything I thought trembled through the rotating blades of an electric fan. The way my voice moved through it. The way my fingers shook. I wore a two-tiered hat. A dead mule is huge. The man with the stick was fat. 4 A dead deer has the face of a rat. Last night I watched seven white deer walk single file across the black edge, the levee’s border. Slowly, each one looked me over, saw I was sleeping, and soon came closer to lick my face all over. 5 All fall I played at being a slave. In the red embers of fires I made I burned slips of paper with politicians’ names to pass the time. I cooked rich soups of dragonflies. I learned to aim an arrow through a devilhorse’s brain. 6 I sat alone by the water. They trusted me with the river. When United Fruit Company boats headed for port, upriver, I called out to sailors, down came stalks of bananas to snag and bring up to the batture. 7 When the polls opened until the polls closed two men dangled their rifles over their shoulders and pretended they couldn’t be seen. The men and women who came were embarrassed. They looked down at the white glare of crushed shells at their feet. They looked off into the distance. 8 In the hot sun on the wooden platform I stood waiting for the icehouse doors to open. I wanted to be asked inside the cool bricks of smoking water, frozen and squared in fifty-pound blocks, rattling along belts of silver rollers. I wanted to be cool and dry. 9 The women were left locked in the house. The rifle’s blue-black barrel shone in the corner against the white, white wall. Somewhere in the swamps around us a man threw himself against the dark. I couldn’t understand why our lights were on. I wondered if he would drown. 10 I was afraid of the iridescent algae pool, hit with glaze after an afternoon storm, lifted like a giant keyhole, lit by the great green eyeball behind it, watching me, watching me turn away, watching me look back, watching me, for all I knew, catch my breath, not wanting to give it back. 11 We walked into the parking lot after 10 o’clock mass on Sunday. A car’s blur crossed our path so close I felt the heat of the sun in the hot wind off its fender. They only meant to scare us. I felt then what my prayers might have been. 12 That afternoon someone decided to slaughter the rabbits. They held the scruffs of their necks, whacked their soft brown crowns with cracked baseball bats. Each one bled through the nose. We fed their guts to the alligator by the shed in the deep, deep hole. 13 I watched them kissing, kissing in sorrow, in the sitting rooms in the funeral parlor. They were drinking cafe au lait and eating ham sandwiches. Yes, there were so many flowers. I didn’t want to be kissed in sorrow. I didn’t want to be patted or pitied. 14 The squeak and thump and mist of flit as someone pumped sprays of insecticide. It fell over my face, like a blessing, like a tingling sensation in my fingers, like a thousand evaporating lessons, it fell on the oil lamp’s wick. The flame danced. It wobbled, dipped and brightened.

The door-latch is always stubborn beyond it dozes a beast tinged by the fire they know who is walking the curve of the road by their footsteps alone glance at the fancy lamp hanging from the sooty ceiling a green and speckled plant withers a child who has wandered cries beneath a long low sky and at last the snow comes on.

I open the box of my favorite postcards and turn them over looking for de Chirico because I remember seeing you standing facing a wall no wider than a column where to your left was a hall going straight back into darkness, the floor a ramp sloping down to where you stood alone and where the room opened out on your right to an auditorium full of people who had just heard you read and were now listening to the other poet. I was looking for the de Chirico because of the places, the empty places. The word “boulevard” came to mind. Standing on the side of the fountains in Paris where the water blew onto me when I was fifteen. It was night. It was dark then too and I was alone. Why didn’t you find me? Why didn’t somebody find me all those years? The form of love was purity. An art. An architecture. Maybe a train. Maybe the shadow of a statue and the statue with its front turned away from me. Maybe one young girl playing alone, hearing even small sounds ring off cobblestones and the stone walls. I turn the cards looking for the one and come to Giacometti’s eyes full of caring and something remote. His eyes are loving and empty, but not with nothingness, not for the usual reasons, but because he is working. The Rothko Chapel empty. A cheap statue of Sappho in the modern city of Mytilene and ancient sunlight. David Park’s four men with smudges for mouths, backed by water, each held still by the impossibility of what art can accomplish. A broken river god, only the body. A girl playing with her rabbit in bed. The postcard of a summer lightning storm over Iowa.

You better rap, my brother says—he can b-box his ass off. Got DJ scratches and spins, will drop it on the two and four, the three and four. Whatever you need. Me posing my bars:My flows are second to none, come here, son. See how it’s done. Wanted to be a rapper? Check. Thought I was going to the NBA? Check. Father went to prison? Check. Brother too? Check. Mother died when I was eight? Check. Hung pictures of Luke Perry on my bedroom wall? What? Yep, give me a bit, and I’ll sprinkle some subjectivity on it. I loved that dude, his whisper-voice, his lean. Auntie worried on the phone: Girl, he got photos of some white boy all over his walls. Me rocking out to Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels.” Silent head nods do more than throw shade. All black people are fluent in silence. Mangled Baldwin quote? Let’s keep wrenching. Everybody’s fluent in silence. You know what a switchblade glare means. No need to read the look she gave me as I sang,Let me run with you tonight.

for Jay Wright my ole man took me to the fulton fish market we walk around in the guts and the scales my ole man show me a dead fish, eyes like throat spit he say “you hongry boy?” i say “naw, not yet” my ole man show me how to pick the leavings he say people throw away fish that not rotten we scaling on our knees back uptown on lenox sold five fish, keepin one for the pot my ole man copped a bottle of wine he say, “boy, build me a fire out in the lot” backyard cat climbin up my leg for fish i make a fire in the ash can my ole man come when he smell fish frank williams is with him, they got wine my ole man say “the boy cotch the big one” he tell big lie and slap me on the head i give the guts to the cat and take me some wine we walk around the sparks like we in hell my ole man is laughin and coughin up wine he say “you hongry boy” i say “naw, not yet” next time i go to fulton fish market first thing i do is take a long drink of wine

Knock me or nothing, the things of this world ring in me, shrill-gorged and shrewish, clicking their charms and their chains and their spouts. Let them. Let the fans whirr. All the similar virgins must have emptied their flimsy pockets, and I was empty enough, sugared and stretched on the unmown lawn, dumb as the frost-pink tongues of the unpruned roses. When you put your arms around me in that moment, when you pulled me to you and leaned back, when you lifted me just a few inches, when you shook me hard then, had you ever heard such emptiness? I had room for every girl's locket, every last dime and pocketknife. Oh my out-sung, fierce, unthinkable— why rattle only the world you placed in me? Won't you clutter the unkissed, idiot stars? They blink and blink like quiet shepherds, like brides-about-your-neck. Call them out of that quietness. Knock them in their nothing, against their empty enamel, against the dark that has no way to hold them and no appetite. Call in the dead to touch them. Let them slip on their own chinks of light.

Know no name Why this holy day honed Hollow day haul I lost wind when wooden I can’t bear to be Unaided in hunt unhanded To haunt when strewn sound Who will be held in hand Brought sent Mooring at the shore Who’re you for For what fewer who wore Be called this wooer More who are the ones In horror to light will strew then sue for war

In Abraham Lincoln’s city, Where they remember his lawyer’s shingle, The place where they brought him Wrapped in battle flags, Wrapped in the smoke of memories From Tallahassee to the Yukon, The place now where the shaft of his tomb Points white against the blue prairie dome, In Abraham Lincoln’s city ... I saw knucks In the window of Mister Fischman’s second-hand store On Second Street. I went in and asked, “How much?” “Thirty cents apiece,” answered Mister Fischman. And taking a box of new ones off a shelf He filled anew the box in the showcase And said incidentally, most casually And incidentally: “I sell a carload a month of these.” I slipped my fingers into a set of knucks, Cast-iron knucks molded in a foundry pattern, And there came to me a set of thoughts like these: Mister Fischman is for Abe and the “malice to none” stuff, And the street car strikers and the strike-breakers, And the sluggers, gunmen, detectives, policemen, Judges, utility heads, newspapers, priests, lawyers, They are all for Abe and the “malice to none” stuff. I started for the door. “Maybe you want a lighter pair,” Came Mister Fischman’s voice. I opened the door ... and the voice again: “You are a funny customer.” Wrapped in battle flags, Wrapped in the smoke of memories, This is the place they brought him, This is Abraham Lincoln's home town.