478 Identity poems

What you need will come to you at the right time says the tarot card I overturned at my friend Nathalie’s house one evening. I was wondering if she said something worth hearing,What? I’m looking at her face, trying to read it, not a clue what she said but I’ll just say yeah and hope. Me, Tabitha, and her aunt are waffling in Waffle House by the Mississippi River. Tabitha’s aunt is all mumble. She either said Do you want a pancake? or You look melancholic. The less I hear the bigger the swamp, so I smile and nod while my head becomes a faint foghorn, a lost river. Why wasn’t I asking her to microphone? When you tell someone you read lips you become a mysterious captain. You watch their brains navigate channels with BSL interpreters in the 
corner of night TV. Sometimes it’s hard to get back the smooth sailing and you go down with the whole conversation. I’m a haze of broken jars, a purple bucket and only I know there’s a hole in it. On Twitter @justnoxy tweets I can’t watchTV/ movies / without subtitles. It’s just too hard to follow. I’m just sitting there pretending and it’s just not worth it. I tweet back you not being able to follow is not your failure. It’s weird, giving the advice you need to someone else, weird as thinking my American friend said I move through London like a Hotep when she actually said I’m used to London life with no sales tax. Deanna (my friend who owns crystals and mentions the existence of multiple moons) says I should write about my mishearings, she thinks it’ll make a good book for her bathroom. I am still afraid I have grown up missing too much information. I think about that episode of The Twilight Zone where an old man walks around the city bar selling bric-a-brac from his suitcase, knowing what people need — scissors, a leaky pen, a bus ticket, combs. In the scene, music is playing loud, meaning if I were in that bar I would miss the mysticism while the old man’s miracles make the barman say WOAH, this guy is from another planet!

I once was a child am a child am someone's child not my mother's not my father's the boss gave us special treatment treatment for something special a lollipop or a sticker glitter from the toy box the better we did the better the plastic prize made in China one year everyone got a spinning top one year everyone got a tap on their shoulders one year everyone was fired everyone fired but me one year we all lost our words one year my father lost his words to a stroke a stroke of bad luck stuck his words used to be so worldly his words fired him let him go without notice can they do that can she do that yes she can in this land she can once we sang songs around a piano this land is your land this land is my land in this land someone always owns the land in this land someone who owns the land owns the buildings on the land owns the people in the buildings unless an earthquake sucks the land in like a long noodle

I pinch myself hard on the inner arm, inwardly smiling yet frightened too – what if I get caught in this far realm, on the underside of the world, in these pixelated centuries where humans are exactly the same, both kind and radically unkind – So anyway, I say, her husband has his ships ready to go to war, and he’s waiting for the wind. He decides to order the sacrifice of their daughter – the wind comes, and they sail off to defend a trading route at Troy. Jade says, And this trading route is called “Helen”? Very good. OK, skip ten years. When the husband comes back, his wife unrolls a purple carpet and his cousin prepares a banquet. His wife says, Darling, the slave-girls have run you a bath. He bathes. His wife finds out there’s someone at the front door from Troy, a woman called Cassandra, holding twins she bore to the husband. Cassandra would like to come in. Maybe this piece of information was the trigger to the murder – at any rate, as her husband steps from the tub, she wraps a net around him as if it were a bathrobe, a net she’d made herself – Wait, are you hungry? Jade says. Come into the kitchen. Amid the chicken bones and a potato salad she says, All right, go on. You have a very nice mouth, I say. Go on, she says, the net, wraps it round him. OK. So the cousin comes in and takes two swipes with his sword, his two-edged sword, then the wife beheads the husband with her double-headed axe AHA! Jade says. Yes, I say. Then, splashed with his blood and bearing his head, she runs to the banqueting room where his followers are being slaughtered among the mixing-bowls. She has defended herself and her daughter – everything else is gloss at that point. Revenge, though sticky-fingered, is sweet. More chicken? Thanks. Her kids, a son and daughter, were sent away in case they grew up wanting to avenge their father. Which of course they do, Jade says. Yes. The surviving girl sends messages to her brother, who’s in another country: don’t forget: come home when you can, and avenge our father – Years pass. Grown up now, the boy goes to Apollo’s shrine for advice, and the oracle tells him to do just that. In the end, the boy does come back from exile, and kills his mother. A court case develops about the matricide, and this is where we come into it. See, up till now, the punishment for matricide has always been death. Lineage has been through the mother. But this play was written at a particular point in history. Or pre-history, Jade says. Right. So the court is held at the Shrine of Apollo, and Apollo himself is counsel for the defence. Alecto is given the job of public prosecutor – Your sister? Jade says. Yes. So the Magistrate calls up some citizens, and we hear the case. What were the mitigating factors? ‘The son was told to do it.’ His father’s ghost and ‘the oracle of Apollo himself’ told him to kill his mother. They made the rest of their case, mostly spurious, one of Apollo’s arguments being that it’s less bad to kill a woman than a man. We made some good arguments, but the vote for the boy to die was fifty-fifty. At the deadlock, Athena turned up, Athena! her garment having been kissed by many men or what, we don’t know, and she in her deciding vote acquitted him. For us to lose, in effect, a case of matricide meant the balance of power was shifting. I pour another vodka. What I didn’t say to Jade was, it meant we’d be lying low for some time, centuries perhaps. I remember the fires of earlier camps. In the distance, border furies, heat furies, storm furies. The sound of the Barking Owl. And this owl, a real owl, sounds like a woman being murdered – Athena, your bird is telling you something! But Athena, last we heard, was with her cousin Kate Kyriakou on their way back to Greece for the Olympics. At the last minute they got a Virgin flight. It’s an irony of fate, I said, that it was a foremost goddess who helped tilt that power. Or not, Jade said, maybe it was simply a pivot-point in storytelling where men must be shown to be in control, and the best way to do that is to get a woman to do the job. Yes, I said. Let’s present it to Athena this way: she’s being chosen to give an award in a public ceremony and get her picture in the morning paper, her big chance, as a goddess, to be kind and compassionate. To downplay the warlike. Mesmerise her with theology – Jade said, and perhaps flirt with her at the same time. For whatever reason, I said, Athena – without consenting to matricide – did not give it a high level of punishment. Certainly she didn’t exact a death. In that sense you have to admit she is a civilising factor, I said. Flick your dreads as you may, Jade said. We hounded the son, though, I said. One time we said we’d leave him alone for a while if he promised to do penance at the Temple of Artemis.

I used to think The mind essential in the body, even As stood the body essential in the mind: Two inseparable things, by nature equal And similar, and in creation’s song Halving the total scale: it is not so. Unlike and cross like driftwood sticks they come Churned in the giddy trough: a chunk of pine, A slab of rosewood: mangled each on each With knocks and friction, or in deadly pain Sheathing each other’s splinters: till at last Without all stuff or shape they ’re jetted up Where in the bluish moisture rot whate’er Was vomited in horror from the sea.

Game of Thrones A man is only worth what people say he is and those Starks are good stock. They’ll knee-deep it. They famish the craving they are fathered by. Manning the forestry of life, they are steadfast and sturdy. When pungent or cruel, they sauce the ache. Light folds them in two. What I want to say is,I would meet you upon this. Let me, too, carry the token of the world. Tell me the secret of what comes next, and then take me river       river        river

I was made erect and lone, And within me is the bone; Still my vision will be clear, Still my life will not be drear, To the center all is near. Where I sit there is my throne. If age choose to sit apart, If age choose, give me the start, Take the sap and leave the heart.

I My life is the gardener of my body. The brain—a hothouse closed tight with its flowers and plants, alien and odd in their sensitivity, their terror of becoming extinct. The face—a formal French garden of symmetrical contours and circular paths of marble with statues and places to rest, places to touch and smell, to look out from, to lose yourself in a green maze, and Keep Off and Don’t Pick the Flowers. The upper body above the navel—an English park pretending to be free, no angles, no paving stones, naturelike, humanlike, in our image, after our likeness, its arms linking up with the big night all around. And my lower body, beneath the navel—sometimes a nature preserve, wild, frightening, amazing, an unpreserved preserve, and sometimes a Japanese garden, concentrated, full of forethought. And the penis and testes are smooth polished stones with dark vegetation between them, precise paths fraught with meaning and calm reflection. And the teachings of my father and the commandments of my mother are birds of chirp and song. And the woman I love is seasons and changing weather, and the children at play are my children. And the life my life. 2 I’ve never been in those places where I’ve never been and never will be, I have no share in the infinity of light-years and dark-years, but the darkness is mine, and the light, and my time is my own. The sand on the seashore—those infinite grains are the same sand where I made love in Achziv and Caesarea. The years of my life I have broken into hours, and the hours into minutes and seconds and fractions of seconds. These, only these, are the stars above me that cannot be numbered. 3 And what is my life span? I’m like a man gone out of Egypt: the Red Sea parts, I cross on dry land, two walls of water, on my right hand and on my left. Pharaoh’s army and his horsemen behind me. Before me the desert, perhaps the Promised Land, too. That is my life span. 4 Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is open in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed within us. And when we die, everything is open again. Open closed open. That’s all we are. 5 What then is my life span? Like shooting a self-portrait. I set up the camera a few feet away on something stable (the one thing that’s stable in this world), I decide on a good place to stand, near a tree, run back to the camera, press the timer, run back again to that place near the tree, and I hear the ticking of time, the whirring like a distant prayer, the click of the shutter like an execution. That is my life span. God develops the picture in His big darkroom. And here is the picture: white hair on my head, eyes tired and heavy, eyebrows black, like the charred lintels above the windows in a house that burned down. My life span is over. 6 I wasn’t one of the six million who died in the Shoah, I wasn’t even among the survivors. And I wasn’t one of the six hundred thousand who went out of Egypt. I came to the Promised Land by sea. No, I was not in that number, though I still have the fire and the smoke within me, pillars of fire and pillars of smoke that guide me by night and by day. I still have inside me the mad search for emergency exits, for soft places, for the nakedness of the land, for the escape into weakness and hope, I still have within me the lust to search for living water with quiet talk to the rock or with frenzied blows. Afterwards, silence: no questions, no answers. Jewish history and world history grind me between them like two grindstones, sometimes to a powder. And the solar year and the lunar year get ahead of each other or fall behind, leaping, they set my life in perpetual motion. Sometimes I fall into the gap between them to hide, or to sink all the way down. 7 I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment millions of human beings are standing at crossroads and intersections, in jungles and deserts, showing each other where to turn, what the right way is, which direction. They explain exactly where to go, what is the quickest way to get there, when to stop and ask again. There, over there. The second turnoff, not the first, and from there left or right, near the white house, by the oak tree. They explain with excited voices, with a wave of the hand and a nod of the head: There, over there, not that there, the other there, as in some ancient rite. This too is a new religion. I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment.

I went into the Maverick Bar In Farmington, New Mexico. And drank double shots of bourbon backed with beer. My long hair was tucked up under a cap I’d left the earring in the car. Two cowboys did horseplay by the pool tables, A waitress asked us where are you from? a country-and-western band began to play “We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie” And with the next song, a couple began to dance. They held each other like in High School dances in the fifties; I recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Oregon. That short-haired joy and roughness— America—your stupidity. I could almost love you again. We left—onto the freeway shoulders— under the tough old stars— In the shadow of bluffs I came back to myself, To the real work, to “What is to be done.”

After Alice Maher’s “Andromeda” Kind bolus of hair, we who have shoehorned ourselves into dream dresses, spooled Louis heels down fettled steps to grooms, or steeled ourselves in suits for the clinch, counter- signatures gripped in fists; we who have lain on carpets beside infants, parched for clear shocks of blue, feculence collecting in our drains, do not forsake us. Domesticated chyme, damp hank slap-lavished on pillow, pray for us. We who have fetched home inventing storage solutions, breaking up space, who feed you and braid you, scratch compact plans on compact days, give us thole to bear up. We’d bindle paradise and stow it where the dust bunnies futz, given leave. Swindle us, please, some less dear salvation. Croon of nootropics, caffeine, tacit utopia, game feel. How the way we live days is the means to live lives. Chevy us through. Tonight, in the kitchens where we make obstacles of each other, we’ll fiddle with the knobs of electrical cookers. Hobs simulacra for hobs, pixelating heat, steam, spall; tumble from above as if from nowhere. Let one of us fright, dash a palm too near. Let flesh char, hair. Give us our brimstone. Be in our waking.

There’s a clever thing, stabs at her hand on every corner now, revising the screed. Watch her huff at the tiny screens that send her chimpish copy up the line, to speed the raising of the giddy, pixelled hall: cornerless, mirror-tiled, the gorging sphere a fast-receding shell enclosing all we say or see, never to disappear, bigger with each second, and the next, its facets auto-replicant, until the Record of  what was— each fingered text and pic, the starry shards the hours distill — impounds what is, slaves us in its spell, sorting the diamonds in our dazzling cell.