478 Identity poems

Moses, from whose loins I sprung, Lit by a lamp in his blood Ten immutable rules, a moon For mutable lampless men. The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy, With the same heaving blood, Keep tide to the moon of Moses. Then why do they sneer at me?

for Elizabeth Ryle Immediately cries were heard. These were the loud wailing of infant souls weeping at the very entrance-way; never had they had their share of life’s sweetness for the dark day had stolen them from their mothers’ breasts and plunged them to a death before their time. —Virgil, The Aeneid , Book VI And then the dark fell and ‘there has never’ I said ‘been a poem to an antibiotic: never a word to compare with the odes on the flower of the raw sloe for fever ‘or the devious Africa-seeking tern or the protein treasures of the sea-bed. Depend on it, somewhere a poet is wasting his sweet uncluttered metres on the obvious ‘emblem instead of the real thing. Instead of sulpha we shall have hyssop dipped in the wild blood of the unblemished lamb, so every day the language gets less ‘for the task and we are less with the language.’ I finished speaking and the anger faded and dark fell and the book beside me lay open at the page Aphrodite comforts Sappho in her love’s duress. The poplars shifted their music in the garden, a child startled in a dream, my room was a mess— the usual hardcovers, half-finished cups, clothes piled up on an old chair— and I was listening out but in my head was a loosening and sweetening heaviness, not sleep, but nearly sleep, not dreaming really but as ready to believe and still unfevered, calm and unsurprised when she came and stood beside me and I would have known her anywhere and I would have gone with her anywhere and she came wordlessly and without a word I went with her down down down without so much as ever touching down but always, always with a sense of mulch beneath us, the way of stairs winding down to a river and as we went on the light went on failing and I looked sideways to be certain it was she, misshapen, musical— Sappho—the scholiast’s nightingale and down we went, again down until we came to a sudden rest beside a river in what seemed to be an oppressive suburb of the dawn. My eyes got slowly used to the bad light. At first I saw shadows, only shadows. Then I could make out women and children and, in the way they were, the grace of love. ‘Cholera, typhus, croup, diptheria’ she said, ‘in those days they racketed in every backstreet and alley of old Europe. Behold the children of the plague.’ Then to my horror I could see to each nipple some had clipped a limpet shape— suckling darknesses—while others had their arms weighed down, making terrible pietàs. She took my sleeve and said to me, ‘be careful. Do not define these women by their work: not as washerwomen trussed in dust and sweating, muscling water into linen by the river’s edge ‘nor as court ladies brailled in silk on wool and woven with an ivory unicorn and hung, nor as laundresses tossing cotton, brisking daylight with lavender and gossip. ‘But these are women who went out like you when dusk became a dark sweet with leaves, recovering the day, stooping, picking up teddy bears and rag dolls and tricycles and buckets— ‘love’s archaeology—and they too like you stood boot deep in flowers once in summer or saw winter come in with a single magpie in a caul of haws, a solo harlequin.’ I stood fixed. I could not reach or speak to them. Between us was the melancholy river, the dream water, the narcotic crossing and they had passed over it, its cold persuasions. I whispered, ‘let me be let me at least be their witness,’ but she said ‘what you have seen is beyond speech, beyond song, only not beyond love; ‘remember it, you will remember it’ and I heard her say but she was fading fast as we emerged under the stars of heaven, ‘there are not many of us; you are dear ‘and stand beside me as my own daughter. I have brought you here so you will know forever the silences in which are our beginnings, in which we have an origin like water,’ and the wind shifted and the window clasp opened, banged and I woke up to find the poetry books stacked higgledy piggledy, my skirt spread out where I had laid it— nothing was changed; nothing was more clear but it was wet and the year was late. The rain was grief in arrears; my children slept the last dark out safely and I wept.

there, on the ground like dirt or a bird december froze & may thawed, blood misted, crying for any mother, the boy who called your mama a bitch bleeds our love for you, his wings frozen & fighting the cold wind of our sneakers. we storm him because we love you & your mama has fed us & only us is allowed to call her out her name because we know her name, Ms. Jones, & she bad & only we can say that & when we bad she has permission from our mamas to beat us like we hers. we hers like you hers. you our boy. we pool our punches into the boy like quarters for a bag of flaming hots. we make him look like a bag of flaming hots. lord forgive me, but i don’t regret it. &, on the real, all these summers later, i miss it. i wish a little bit to gather around a man’s body & stomp in the name of love, beat what he said about my next to blood back into his vermilion mouth, to make his mouth a beautiful, smashed tomato. really tho. Leland, you remember how we beat that nigga? our middle school ritual, that thirty-second eternity. later, i licked his blood off my nikes & dreamed we were water lilies holding the water down. • they were around me like nigga1 nigga2      nigga3 nigga4     me     nigga5 nigga6       nigga7 nigga8 & i felt    ...    safe? what could be safer than a circle of boys too afraid of killing you to kill you? the fists that broke my ribs also wanted me to live. i praise each one true god for each foot that was not a sharp anything. i had always wanted 8 niggas on me (but not) like that. each hand laid upon me like a rude & starving prayer. after a while i started to           like it i leaned into it      unblocked my face the bottoms of their shoes were the sweet of a well-chewed eraser. i was their promise. their ink. you should have heard them laugh a language so delicious i cracked up cracked grin & all. i didn’t know a thing about love until those boys walked away so happy. my heart pouring from my nose.

There she was standing over me. She inched her face close to my face. She put her hands on my face. I remembered her immediately, but did not speak. My eyes blurred. They were hot and heavy. It hurt to look at Ain’t Sally. It hurt to see. I closed my eyes. I felt her cool touch. She chanted. “You will be well. You will not die.Chim chukma taha che. You will be well.Chi pesa taha che.” She sang to me. Then I heard her leave. A woman whose bed was surrounded by white partitions, moaned again. This was not a new sound. It was a constant. Her breath whistled irregularly. There was no escaping the whistle. The whistling sounds were everywhere in the white room. Then they stopped. Another woman in another bed called out. No answer. She pushed the bell. Women wearing white dresses came into the room. They pushed the partitions back. They said the whistling woman was dead. I went back to sleep. Before the hospital. Before rheumatic fever. Before the dead woman. I had met Ain’t Sally. I was seven years old. Ain’t Sally was an ancient Indian relative who lived in Hayrick, outside of Dublin. A place of the Snakes. A place of memory. Once a base camp for nomadic tribes following buffalo, once a county seat, Hayrick, Texas took its name from a solitary mountain standing in the breadth of open grasslands. Only a state government road sign remains, marking the place of Hayrick. Marking the sign of the Snakes. The only time we visited Ain’t Sally, I rode in the back seat of our green 1950 Chevrolet, and listened to my Indian grandmother tell stories about our family. Chapters went like this: —Life in a  Dugout. —Making Lye Soap. —How Grandfather got VD. I don’t remember much of the drive to Hayrick. We drove the rural roads of West Texas. There were two lanes of dust and dirt, stagnant, green-belted river beds and one-lane bridges. When we arrived at Ain’t Sally’s the old woman ambled out of a rusted screen door of a paintless wooden house. Breasts sagging, her thin body lacking in strength seemed unable to support her weight. She wore a sleeveless dress that revealed naked brown skin, skin that was no more than a sheath for aging bones. Hairless underarms. She fed us saltine crackers and cold squirrel dumplings. She asked me questions. She asked me about my secrets. I don’t remember having any to tell. She told me hers while I ate. She said I reminded her of someone she’d seen a long time ago. I remember dancing for her. I told her I was a bird. A manbird. A hunter. I danced around the kitchen table and sang and pretended to be PowWow Dancer. A bird of dance. A bird of rhythm. When my mother and grandmother went to town, Ain’t Sally took me for a walk around her place. The farm had belonged to her relatives. We went down to the dry gorge and she pointed out all kinds of roots and trees. She asked me if I knew about the plants of the pasture. I said yes. I thought I was lying. As we walked farther from the house, I remember a hot gusty wind picked up her voice like dust tendrils on bedrock and blew it away from me. I ran to catch the sound. I found Ain’t Sally sitting on a granite rock. —Ala Tek. Indian girl. —Come and see, on our land, the four winds of the old days will blow through our hair. Then she tugged at my black braids. —Come and visit the Snakes, Ala Tek. —When I was your age they blew across this place like red dust devils on flat neutral plains. —Can you see them. —Do you hear the Snake People calling us? —Yes. I can see them. I hear them. They are naked and wild. Their eyes, like black grapes shining in the Sun, stare back at me. —They’re hungry. I watch the Snake People eat the fleshy intestines of my uncle’s butchered cow. I taste the hot blood, roll it around on my tongue and remember. It makes me sweat. I watch the Snake People play games around the carcass. And before we walk back into the house, the old woman and me, she runs her crooked fingers across my eyes and says. —Ala Tek. Indian Girl. —The ghosts of your ancestors will visit you there. The rest of the visit blurs. My last memories are from that day. She waves to me from her front porch. She never explained the Snakes. She only said, “Che pisa lauchi. I’ll see you. Indians never say good-bye.” I never saw Ain’t Sally again until she appeared in my hospital room. I thought she was dead. I didn’t know about the Snakes until some twenty-five years later. To make the sign of the snake means: Comanches are here.

The human cylinders Revolving in the enervating dusk That wraps each closer in the mystery Of singularity Among the litter of a sunless afternoon Having eaten without tasting Talked without communion And at least two of us Loved a very little Without seeking To know if our two miseries In the lucid rush-together of automatons Could form one opulent wellbeing Simplifications of men In the enervating dusk Your indistinctness Serves me the core of the kernel of you When in the frenzied reaching out of intellect to intellect Leaning brow to brow       communicative Over the abyss of the potential Concordance of respiration Shames Absence of corresponding between the verbal sensory And reciprocity Of conception And expression Where each extrudes beyond the tangible One thin pale trail of speculation From among us we have sent out Into the enervating dusk One little whining beast Whose longing Is to slink back to antediluvian burrow And one elastic tentacle of intuition To quiver among the stars The impartiality of the absolute Routs      the polemic Or which of us Would not Receiving the holy-ghost Catch it      and caging Lose it Or in the problematic Destroy the Universe With a solution

Naked or not, I’m a costume that moves, figurine with a face that changes. You could call me a mood. I begin cheerful but sometimes turn solemn when confronted with my own mythology (wolf in a cape, cat scratch on a cupboard door, mouse tail in the hand of a bland farmer’s wife, a drop of blood on her shoe). Today’s beginning ended in a dream. In a fantastical bed, a lover leaned in to kiss me just as I realized I was part machine, part primitive urge. I left the bed and said, You know, don’t you, not everyone is so disposed. And then I heard from inside my head, You should say, not everyone is so disposed to your utopia. Only then did I realize I’d been inexact. Even here there are scolds that tell you how to be. Sometimes they live inside. Naked or not, I am trying to tuck my arms invisibly behind my back so that all you can see are my breasts and my highly simplified head.

For the centenary of Girton College i hyphen (Gk. together, in one) a short dash or line used to connect two words together as a compound 1869- 1969 to connect Chapel Wing and Library. But also: to divide for etymological or other purpose. A gap in stone makes actual the paradox of a centenary. “It was a hyphen connecting different races.” and to the library “a bridge for migrations”. In search of an etymology for compound lives, this architecture, an exercise in paleography (Victorian Gothic) asserts the same intention. Portraits busts and books the “context in which we occur” that teaches us our meaning, ignore the lacunae of a century in their state- ment of our need to hyphenate.

Yeah. It’s only a matter of environment if I’m a genius. A genius is kohlrabi in a turnip in kale in cellophane in the freezer. In files they descend on the white skin and converge in the corner’s follicles. The ants are illuminated. Basta. Translated from the Slovenian

24. Zachary talks about wanting to be with someone because he feels like he can be a better person for someone else. He says he doesn't know what he's doing, wishes he had someone to do things for. I tell him I think we are very different people. Theory as pure verbalism: a generated knowledge with negative impact. If I begin to miss someone,  I think, "Life is bad anyway."

The future is one of place devoid of race. A jawbone under a sock is a geological clock. The plunking of rain on the termite-riddled windowpane: reading a Bible on that ledge is a tiny college. A Galápagos tortoise is killed (or, simply, unwilled). The Ebola virus weeps, or retires, because, like us, it tires. Meanwhile, below the subbasement, a Suede Revolution: the phlegmatic skill of the cryptographer soixante-huitards the teleprompter. The id in facsimile is suspended on a leash, twisting in the rain above that goddammed windowpane. Being is slightly corrupted by the Thinking that’s one-upped it (like the pun on pain) and will never love again.