478 Identity poems

I am fourteen and my skin has betrayed me the boy I cannot live without still sucks his thumb in secret how come my knees are always so ashy what if I die before morning and momma's in the bedroom with the door closed. I have to learn how to dance in time for the next party my room is too small for me suppose I die before graduation they will sing sad melodies but finally tell the truth about me There is nothing I want to do and too much that has to be done and momma's in the bedroom with the door closed. Nobody even stops to think about my side of it I should have been on Math Team my marks were better than his why do I have to be the one wearing braces I have nothing to wear tomorrow will I live long enough to grow up and momma's in the bedroom with the door closed.

You lean disconsolate on your stool, Sullen and certain As minor royalty rusticated to this Unhelpful climate of solvents, gaskets, pliers, and bolts. Because they are new and manifold and useful You feel their whispers against you. The staunch Resistance of objects. How can I tell you O my soul, To exhaust the realm of the possible when Ever the light Is uncongenial as February and your hand unlovely? Like a dog nearly annihilated by nerves And boredom chewing her paw to sore, red velvet, You’ve torn your nails so far flesh swells Closed around each bed like an eyeless socket. That you should be making such small change! Fingers inarticulate as moles nudge a debris Of dimes not thick enough to hide The candy-colored butterfly flaring Across the tender, veined delta of your hand Heralding indelibly the eviction Of this vulgar flesh Or the one word needled in black, knuckle-Gothic

Berkeley psychologists told Harold his anger was justified. What parents let their child go for a midnight walk under no moon?I couldn’t have been more than four

Off Havana, the ocean is green this morning of my birth. The conchers clean their knives on leather straps and watch the sky while three couples who have been dancing on the deck of a ship in the harbor, the old harbor of the fifties, kiss each other's cheeks and call it a night. On a green sofa five dresses wait to be fitted. The seamstress kneeling at Mother's feet has no idea I am about to be born. Mother pats her stomach which is flat as the lace mats on the dressmaker's table. She thinks I'm playing in my room. But as usual, she's wrong. I'm about to be born in a park in Havana. Oh, this is important, everything in the dressmaker's house is furred like a cat. And Havana leans right up against the windows. In the park, the air is chocolate, the sweet breath of a man smoking an expensive cigar. The grass is drinkable, dazzling, white. In a moment I'll get up from a bench, lured by a flock of pigeons, lazily sipping the same syrupy music through a straw. Mother is so ignorant, she thinks I'm rolled like a ball of yarn under the bed. What does she know of how I got trapped in my life? She thinks it's all behind her, the bloody sheets, the mirror in the ceiling where I opened such a sudden furious blue, her eyes bruised shut like mine. The pigeon's eyes are orange, unblinking, a doll's. Mother always said I wanted to touch everything because I was a child. But I was younger than that. I was so young I thought whatever I wanted, the world wanted too. Workers in the fields wanted the glint of sun on their machetes. Sugarcane came naturally sweet, you had only to lick the earth where it grew. The music I heard each night outside my window lived in the mouth of a bird. I was so young I thought it was easy as walking into the ocean which always had room for my body. So when I held out my hands I expected the pigeon to float between them like a blossom, dusting my fingers with the manna of its wings. But the world is wily, and doesn't want to be held for long, which is why as my hands reached out, workers lay down their machetes and left the fields, which is why a prostitute in a little calle of Havana dreamed the world was a peach and flicked open a knife. And Mother, startled, shook out a dress with big peonies splashed like dirt across the front, as if she had fallen chasing after me in the rain. But what could I do? I was about to be born, I was about to have my hair combed into the new music everyone was singing. The dressmaker sang it, her mouth filled with pins. The butcher sang it and wiped blood on his apron. Mother sang it and thought her body was leaving her body. And when I tried I was so young the music beat right through me, which is how the pigeon got away. The song the world sings day after day isn't made of feathers, and the song a bird pours itself into is tough as a branch growing with the singer and the singer's delight.

my name is Alice Elizabeth, so am I Allie Sheedy of the movie Short Circuits thus angry or Elizabeth McGovern self-controlled? This question is posited on a television screen where I can't quite identify the actress shown—which is she? I am Allie and I will continue to rant. ____________________ My voice rises in real life often— because I am 'passionate' ... that's a convenient word. ____________________ I'm still in the forest, darkening wishing I were 'nicer.' Hardwood says, You should stand up soon I'll help you I say, I have cramps I say, I'm using my period, to get pissed off and to Know. ____________________ I dreamed, last night, about an immense Dead Seal below the surface of the water in a harbor pull the curtain down. For months you would not break the spell for eternities you have not done so, citing economic exigencies; the whole thing is a mess. I might rather be dead than doing what it takes to keep the seal under water whale-sized E is for seal. For spell. For suppression. ____________________ To take part in you is to die is why one dies Have I said this before? ____________________ I am Alp the Dizzy. ____________________ The dead seal isn't a person, it's poetry the seal the hallmark of selfhood, dead grotesquely large and richly hardening. "Hardwood it was someone like you you drowned the seal" "No I'm making both you and it 'hard.' " ____________________ And I'm still in the forest. ____________________ And I'm still in the forest Money's more the real live poetry abstract symbolic imaginary trade your life for it and trade it for your life so you'll have something 'to do' Sink the whale and sleep all day in the real world, up and functioning more fully imagined and dreamed, in society's than in your own, imagination? I'm standing I'm standing up Hard I keep being Hardwood myself, dark and hard. ____________________ Initiating a new 'broken symmetry' (spinning to the Left, like a newborn neutrino) so that we can have a new consciousness ... am I doing that? Yes I think so. ____________________ The forest contains a French restaurant every meter or so ... difficult to fast in this dream vision. We're a very unpopular group today We've shot off another great bomb and we've shot down a terrorist, an Arab, young, before we even found out what he "knew." ____________________ Tell me something beautiful, bitter because we are somehow bitter, forever, a taste included in origin, in love, in you. So I don't have to be cloyed. ... soul's waters are reticent sly swamps. It had nothing in it, that swamp; because I didn't know how to look for the parts of its obvious whole—death is minute, flavorful parts—which are said to spin as I'm said to walk, moving while else mostly unconscious of that. ____________________ In the new consciousness

If you undo your do you would be strange. Hair has been on my mind. I used to lean in the doorway and watch my stony woman wind the copper through the black, and play with my understanding, show me she cóuld take a cup of river water, and watch it shimmy, watch it change, turn around and become ash bone. Wind in the cottonwoods wakes me to a day so thin its breastbone shows, so paid out it shakes me free of its blue dust. I will arrange that river water, bottom juice. I conjure my head in the stream and ride with the silk feel of it as my woman bathes me, and shaves away the scorn, sponges the grit of solitude from my skin, laves the salt water of self-esteem over my feathering body. How like joy to come upon me in remembering a head of hair and the way water would caress it, and stress beauty in the flair and cut of the only witness to my dance under sorrow's tree. This swift darkness is spring's first hour. I carried my life, like a stone, in a ragged pocket, but I had a true weaving song, a sly way with rhythm, a healing tone.

“the withness of the body” The heavy bear who goes with me, A manifold honey to smear his face, Clumsy and lumbering here and there, The central ton of every place, The hungry beating brutish one In love with candy, anger, and sleep, Crazy factotum, dishevelling all, Climbs the building, kicks the football, Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city. Breathing at my side, that heavy animal, That heavy bear who sleeps with me, Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar, A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp, Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope Trembles and shows the darkness beneath. —The strutting show-off is terrified, Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants, Trembles to think that his quivering meat Must finally wince to nothing at all. That inescapable animal walks with me, Has followed me since the black womb held, Moves where I move, distorting my gesture, A caricature, a swollen shadow, A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive, Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness, The secret life of belly and bone, Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown, Stretches to embrace the very dear With whom I would walk without him near, Touches her grossly, although a word Would bare my heart and make me clear, Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed Dragging me with him in his mouthing care, Amid the hundred million of his kind, The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

At the confluence of tea roses and Russian sage we made a right at the curved iron fence, one of my dead friends beside me explaining how trees communicated but I couldn’t understand a thing because it was all blurry — the way it gets — and though I knew him well I couldn’t say for sure now whether it was Larry or Phil or Galway or Charlie until I realized it was me talking in some kind of Hebrish they spoke in my town by the Delaware and it was used for code the way one of the Amerindian languages was used in World War II the Germans couldn’t in a million years break since they weren’t as pragmatic irrational and in-your-face as the English and Americans were. I noticed the bees were digging in for a late lunch of what for them was boiled beef and horseradish or maybe it was just for me and they were bent over guzzling madly while paying no attention to the two of us or in any way tired of the nectars since it ran the whole gamut from oysters to soup to — well — boiled beef to strawberry-rhubarb pie and a little whisky after, some of it spilled on the vanilla ice cream that underlaid the pie it had once overlaid, all of this depending on the blossoms they circled over and bent down upon, a cafeteria as good as the one on Broadway called Stanley’s I circled and bent over expending nickels dimes and quarters when the Dulles brothers ran the country. It was Larry, I’m sure now, and what we talked about was cardboard and we were amazed that in the open spaces beside the hotel on 47th Street there were four or five small cardboard “houses,” both of us remembered, the homeless had claimed to sleep in and provide a safe place for their black plastic garbage bags, the size of a room at the Sloane House on 34th Street near the Pennsylvania Station where I put up the price of a meal then for a clean pillowcase with little or no stuffing and a cardboard bed as stiff as metal and a cardboard breakfast of cardboard bread and eggs and between us we talked cardboard, shirts from the cleaners with sheets of cardboard we drew on, cardboard soles in ruined shoes we both wore when we were children, cardboard hats, cardboard to lie on listening to outdoor concerts and cardboard masks we made with scissors and crayon for costume dances, balls is what we called them as if we were art students in Paris about to swim in the nearest fountain. Though what I want to say is the bees were too busy to do us any harm and it was packs of wild dogs, not swarms of bees, that terrified me (Larry, too) except for one occasion when I pushed the wrong end of an old broom into a hive of yellow jackets on the underside of a low-lying garage roof and an angry swarm chased me through the yard and over a fence hating any form of criminal intrusion, urban renewal, or gentrification, I who couldn’t resist intrusions, who never could, omnivorous as I was, living on apples and bananas as well as baby lamb chops, who ran like hell that day (Larry, too) for we in our separate ways didn’t want to be paralyzed then eaten by larvae, none of us dead ones did.

Mistress Adrienne, I have been given a bed with a pink dresser In the hothouse Joining the Concord Public Library: the walls and roof are Glass and my privacy comes from the apple-geraniums, Violets, ferns, marigolds, and white mayflags. I get my meals With the janitor and his wife and all of the books are mine To use. I scour, sweep, and dust. I hope you don’t think of me As a runaway? I remember your kindness, Your lessons in reading and writing on the piazza. My journey was unusual. I saw some of the war And it was terrible even far up into the North. My first fright was at a train depot outside Memphis Where some soldiers found me eating not yet ripened Quinces and grapes, they took me prisoner: first I helped some children carry tree limbs to the woodbox Of the locomotive, then, I was shown to a gentleman In the passenger car who was searching for his runaway Negress in a purple dress; he wouldn’t identify me, And I was thrown in with about forty stray blacks into An open boxcar and soon we were moving, next to me A man was sucking on the small breasts of a girl Maybe twelve years of age, across from them A sad old woman smiled as she puffed on an old cigar end, By afternoon she was dead, her two friends Just kicked her out so that she rolled down into pasture Frightening some hogs that ran off into a thicket. The girl next to me whimpered and shook. Those quinces Just ran straight through me and all I could do was Squat in one corner that was supplied with ammonia-waters And hay. We were given that night Confederate uniforms To mend and when the others slept I dressed in three Shirts and trousers and leapt from the moving train, The padding helped some but I couldn’t walk the next day. I hid in a shack that seemed lonely but for a flock Of turkeys, some young hens, and a corncrib with tall Split palings. The next morning from a hill I watched field-workers on a tobacco plantation, it took Two men to carry a single leaf like a corpse from A battle scene. That night I found a horse with a bit In its mouth made of telegraph wire. He carried me up all The way to Youngstown.Chloe, you must Learn to swim in the pond and to ride the old sorrel.

A heritage of a sort. A heritage of comradeship and suffocation. The bawling pit-hooter and the god’s explosive foray, vengeance, before retreating to his throne of sulphur. Now this black-robed god of fossils and funerals, petrifier of underground forests and flowers, emerges with his grim retinue past a pony’s skeleton, past human skulls, into his half-propped up, empty, carbon colony. Above, on the brutalised, unstitched side of a Welsh mountain, it has to be someone from somewhere else who will sing solo not of the marasmus of the Valleys, the pit-wheels that do not turn, the pump-house abandoned; nor of how, after a half-mile fall regiments of miners’ lamps no longer, midge-like, rise and slip and bob. Only someone uncommitted, someone from somewhere else, panorama-high on a coal-tip, may jubilantly laud the re-entry of the exiled god into his shadowless kingdom. He, drunk with methane, raising a man’s femur like a sceptre; she, his ravished queen, admiring the blood-stained black roses that could not thrive on the plains of Enna.