478 Identity poems

So by sixteen we move in packs learn to strut and slide in deliberate lowdown rhythm talk in a syn/co/pa/ted beat because we want so bad to be cool, never to be mistaken for white, even when we leave these rowdier L.A. streets— remember how we paint our eyes like gangsters flash our legs in nylons sassy black high heels or two inch zippered boots stack them by the door at night next to Daddy’s muddy gardening shoes.

If you are going there by foot, prepare to get wet. You are not you anymore. You are a girl standing in a pool of clouds as they catch fire in the distance. There are laws of   heaven and those of   place and those who see the sky in the water, angels in ashes that are the delta’s now. They say if you sweep the trash from your house after dark, you sweep away your luck. If you are going by foot, bring a stick, a third leg, and honor the great disorder, the great broom of waterfowl and songbirds. Prepare to voodoo your way, best you can, knowing there is a little water in things you take for granted, a little charity and squalor for the smallest forms of life. Voodoo was always mostly charity. People forget. If you shake a tablecloth outside at night, someone in your family dies. There are laws we make thinking it was us who made them. We are not us. We are a floodplain by the Mississippi that once poured slaves upriver to the fields. We are a hurricane in the making. We could use a magus who knows something about suffering, who knows a delta’s needs. We understand if   you want a widow to stay single, cut up her husband’s shoes. He is not himself anyway and walks barefoot across a landscape that has no north. Only a ghost tree here and there, a frog, a cricket, a bird. And if the fates are kind, a girl with a stick, who is more at home, being homeless, than you will ever be.

after Marina Wilson Consider the hands that write this letter. Left palm pressed flat against paper, as we have done before, over my heart, in peace or reverence to the sea, some beautiful thing I saw once, felt once: snow falling like rice flung from the giants' wedding, or strangest of strange birds. & consider, then, the right hand, & how it is a fist, within which a sharpened utensil, similar to the way I've held a spade, the horse's reins, loping, the very fists I've seen from roads through Limay & Estel í . For years, I have come to sit this way: one hand open, one hand closed, like a farmer who puts down seeds & gathers up; food will come from that farming. Or, yes, it is like the way I've danced with my left hand opened around a shoulder, my right hand closed inside of another hand. & how I pray, I pray for this to be my way: sweet work alluded to in the body's position to its paper: left hand, right hand like an open eye, an eye closed: one hand flat against the trapdoor, the other hand knocking, knocking.

my puppet-strings are the sweet decaying lamps I flutter round. I am as immense as a black kid with a spinning top. drowned tripper fat crawls into hollow cuffs to be sewn up like hot cats cracked soft caryatids in tails. I'll force you all to your knees your dirty muzzles will squawk out of your faces. and I will continue to climb I'll spread my thin arms along the queer walls till they bleed. I'll reach into threadbare velvet so that you bash yourselves like poor moths on corners of night. the reason I'm here is to scratch all the white bellies squatting down there. your stupid silence I will  just toss up in the air. I am as sky high as all your staring regards laid end to end on the ground somewhere lies my broken smile.

I’m tired of the gods, I’m pious about the ancestors: afloat In the wake widening behind me in time, the restive devisers. My father had one job from high school till he got fired at thirty. The year was 1947 and his boss, planning to run for mayor, Wanted to hire an Italian veteran, he explained, putting it In plain English. I was seven years old, my sister was two. The barbarian tribes in the woods were so savage the Empire Had to conquer them to protect and clear its perimeter. So into the woods Rome sent out missions of civilizing Governors and invaders to establish schools, courts, garrisons: Soldiers, clerks, officials, citizens with their household slaves. Years or decades or entire lives were spent out in the hinterlands— Which might be good places to retire on a government pension, Especially if in those work-years you had acquired a native wife. Often I get these things wrong or at best mixed up but I do Feel piety toward those persistent mixed families in Gaul, Britain, Thrace. When I die may I take my place in the wedge Widening and churning in the mortal ocean of years of souls. As I get it, the Roman colonizing and mixing, the intricate Imperial Processes of enslaving and freeing, involved not just the inevitable Fucking in all senses of the word, but also marriages and births As developers and barbers, scribes and thugs mingled and coupled With the native people and peoples. Begetting and trading, they Needed to swap, blend and improvise languages—couples Especially needed to invent French, Spanish, German: and I confess— Roman, barbarian—I find that Creole work more glorious than God. The way it happened, the school sent around a notice: anybody Interested in becoming an apprentice optician, raise your hand. It was the Great Depression, anything about a job sounded good to Milford Pinsky, who told me he thought it meant a kind of dentistry. Anyway, he was bored sitting in study hall, so he raised his hand, And he got the job as was his destiny—full-time, once he graduated. Joe Schiavone was the veteran who took the job, not a bad guy, Dr. Vineburg did get elected mayor, Joe worked for him for years. At the bank an Episcopalian named John Smock, whose family owned A piece of the bank, had played sports with Milford. He gave him a small Loan with no collateral, so he opened his own shop, grinding lenses And selling glasses: as his mother-in-law said, “almost a Professional.” Optician comes from a Greek word that has to do with seeing. Banker comes from an Italian word for a bench, where people sat, I imagine, and made loans or change.Pinsky like “Tex” or “Brooklyn” Is a name nobody would have if they were still in that same place: Those names all signify someone who’s been away from home a while. Schiavone means “a Slav.”Milford is a variant on the names of poets— Milton, Herbert, Sidney—certain immigrants gave their offspring. Creole comes from a word meaning to breed or to create, in a place.

D always felt, somehow or other, double. He was an upright line, but then again, he was a curve. When he looked in the mirror straight on, he saw the dapper features of the diplomat he was. But sideways, if he took off his horn-rimmed glasses, he imagined he could be taken for a rather distinguished Dame. He always saw both sides to everything. Would he ever find his dæmon—the divine spirit within? Did he really have one spirit? D seemed to be singing a duet with himself. Seeing both sides made him a champion procrastinator. D dilly-dallied. Waited till the last minute to decide anything. At every posting, he drove the staff crazy. But that was diplomacy. Now dusk dropped on the gated embassy grounds. D flipped on his desk lamp, and the pool of light shut out the trees, looming and dissolving. D drew the drapes, deaf to the delicate drone of insect wings. He returned to his desk, trying to distract himself from a strange little pain that had come to him all his life, like a recurrent dream. (Except, he had to confess, he never dreamed.) The pain was a distinct tiny stab in a spot, well, what would you call that? D called it down there. For years, since he was a little d, he considered all the options about this strange pain. It was nothing, really. He went long times between feeling it. Maybe it was too slight to worry about, but then again . . . At last D decided to see a doctor. As a matter of fact, he saw a number. “Tell me your dreams,” the first doctor said. “Don't bother to ask me, I never dream,” D said. “In dreams begin responsibilities,” the doctor quoted. D demanded a referral. “I've got a very specific pain,” he said to the next doctor. He pointed to, well, down there. “Your testicle,” the physician said. Which required a test. Several. And more. Finally the second doctor read all the results and announced, “Aha, a dermoid cyst.” What? Inside the cyst were hair follicles and an eye-type thing with eyelashes and a tooth. “Do you think I was a twin?” D wondered with a weird kind of delight as he examined the x-ray. Well, the doctor wouldn’t go that far. These dermoid cysts were usually removed in childhood. No reason, however, to remove it now. D wouldn’t dream of having it removed! It explained everything! That slightly creepy darling little creature in there must have been a twin, someone D had grown around as she dissolved. D was convinced it was a twin sister. And D had absorbed her. Of course he wanted to keep her with him. That very day, he had his first dream. Exhausted after his discovery, he had returned to the embassy in the late afternoon. Unable to face his office, he diverted his steps from the front walk toward the deserted path on the grounds where no one ever seemed to stroll. He walked deeper into the woods. The path sloped into a shaded dimple in the earth. It was dusk in the dell. D heard the drone of insect wings. In the mottled light a dragonfly dove straight down. Up curved a damselfly. Impulsively D lay down in the leaves in his three-piece suit and curled up like a praying divine, two hands under his chin. He felt himself melting a little. All the old bedevilments dispersed into a delicate dampness. The world softened from darkling to darling . . . . . .A stately antlered stag appeared in the distance and slowly, with a calm command, walked closer until D could see that he wore a diamond necklace around his neck. The stag slowly bowed his head, doffed his entire rack of antlers, and raised his head up again, looking directly at D.Now the deer was a doe! The doe blinked her eyes at D, as if waking. Then she donned the antlers, and turned and walkedaway . . . D woke up ravenously hungry—and overjoyed. He dusted himself off and drove straight to dinner. As he stared out the restaurant window, eating his dumplings, he wondered if responsibilities really do begin in dreams. Maybe dreams are responsible to us, he thought. He felt his sister inside him. She was the reason he was a debonair man, a man who understood that everything has two sides: inner/outer, yes/no. D thought both in lines as sharp as the creases in trousers, and in curves like the swirls of a skirt. What do I really know? he asked himself. Only that he had woken strangely endeared to himself—and satisfied. Now he understood the necessity of delay. To wait, and then to discover. Never to have only one answer. The napkin at the restaurant had come rolled inside a little sparkly ring. “Add this to my bill,” he said to the waiter. And pocketed the little diadem as a reminder of the dyad he was.

I wanted to be seen. But who would see me? I couldn’t think of the name for anything but a flower. The government makes coins that size and shape so your hand can feel safe holding them. The pictures stamped remind us where we are, or how the landscape we live in connects itself, through common value, to a different place. On this one, a spinnaker sails past a bridge. On that, a diamond shines like a child’s stilled top over a bird, as if the diamond made the natural world — bird, forest, state flower, sheaf of healthy corn, shining water — out of proportion in relation to itself. I love this. My own state has a bear, so small and out of proportion to me that my life- line can cross behind it. At last I do not fear that but feel proud the animal can sit in my palm so silently until I spend it. And if I lose it, then it becomes even more quiet. Most still just have an eagle, so it is as if 30 eagles were passed over from one hand to another when the one charged with arranging things for his Savior’s dinner arranged his Savior’s death. Heavier the yoke of heat in solitude. A walk uphill does not feel manageable. Who will see me?

I’m a pipe cleaner. A drop of moisture on the big nose. A pushing landscape, indecipherable. You speak of a very good sort of Englishness. That world could stand as a mallet. A one-body god with penis or not. I want only to admire the grass. The great locks of trees. That the idea is enough. My bringing herbs to myself thyself. My life hits my ears. A shredded pinky stream of bass and corrugated paper. Who is it that actually sees herself? The heart center of the fragrance billowing toward its end. My mother crammed in her room next to her mother. She was obedient. She was the method and voted for the wrong person. Our sore throats were our throats. We said to ourselves in our clay structures we are the motherboards. We’ll pull the blue ox back into our barn where the three kings still kneel. We cleaned the stable. We pushed the brush over the beautiful animals.

He gossips like my grandmother, this man with my face, and I could stand amused all afternoon in the Hon Kee Grocery, amid hanging meats he chops: roast pork cut from a hog hung by nose and shoulders, her entire skin burnt crisp, flesh I know to be sweet, her shining face grinning up at ducks dangling single file, each pierced by black hooks through breast, bill, and steaming from a hole stitched shut at the ass. I step to the counter, recite, and he, without even slightly varying the rhythm of his current confession or harangue, scribbles my order on a greasy receipt, and chops it up quick. Such a sorrowful Chinese face, nomad, Gobi, Northern in its boniness clear from the high warlike forehead to the sheer edge of the jaw. He could be my brother, but finer, and, except for his left forearm, which is engorged, sinewy from his daily grip and wield of a two-pound tool, he's delicate, narrow- waisted, his frame so slight a lover, some rough other might break it down its smooth, oily length. In his light-handed calligraphy on receipts and in his moodiness, he is a Southerner from a river-province; suited for scholarship, his face poised above an open book, he’d mumble his favorite passages. He could be my grandfather; come to America to get a Western education in 1917, but too homesick to study, he sits in the park all day, reading poems and writing letters to his mother. He lops the head off, chops the neck of the duck into six, slits the body open, groin to breast, and drains the scalding juices, then quarters the carcass with two fast hacks of the cleaver, old blade that has worn into the surface of the round foot-thick chop-block a scoop that cradles precisely the curved steel. The head, flung from the body, opens down the middle where the butcher cleanly halved it between the eyes, and I see, foetal-crouched inside the skull, the homunculus, gray brain grainy to eat. Did this animal, after all, at the moment its neck broke, image the way his executioner shrinks from his own death? Is this how I, too, recoil from my day? See how this shape hordes itself, see how little it is. See its grease on the blade. Is this how I’ll be found when judgement is passed, when names are called, when crimes are tallied? This is also how I looked before I tore my mother open. Is this how I presided over my century, is this how I regarded the murders? This is also how I prayed. Was it me in the Other I prayed to when I prayed? This too was how I slept, clutching my wife. Was it me in the other I loved when I loved another? The butcher sees me eye this delicacy. With a finger, he picks it out of the skull-cradle and offers it to me. I take it gingerly between my fingers and suck it down. I eat my man. The noise the body makes when the body meets the soul over the soul’s ocean and penumbra is the old sound of up-and-down, in-and-out, a lump of muscle chug-chugging blood into the ear; a lover’s heart-shaped tongue; flesh rocking flesh until flesh comes; the butcher working at his block and blade to marry their shapes by violence and time; an engine crossing, re-crossing salt water, hauling immigrants and the junk of the poor. These are the faces I love, the bodies and scents of bodies for which I long in various ways, at various times, thirteen gathered around the redwood, happy, talkative, voracious at day’s end, eager to eat four kinds of meat prepared four different ways, numerous plates and bowls of rice and vegetables, each made by distinct affections and brought to table by many hands. Brothers and sisters by blood and design, who sit in separate bodies of varied shapes, we constitute a many-membered body of love. In a world of shapes of my desires, each one here is a shape of one of my desires, and each is known to me and dear by virtue of each one’s unique corruption of those texts, the face, the body: that jut jaw to gnash tendon; that wide nose to meet the blows a face like that invites; those long eyes closing on the seen; those thick lips to suck the meat of animals or recite 300 poems of the T’ang; these teeth to bite my monosyllables; these cheekbones to make those syllables sing the soul. Puffed or sunken according to the life, dark or light according to the birth, straight or humped, whole, manqué, quasi, each pleases, verging on utter grotesquery. All are beautiful by variety. The soul too is a debasement of a text, but, thus, it acquires salience, although a human salience, but inimitable, and, hence, memorable. God is the text. The soul is a corruption and a mnemonic. A bright moment, I hold up an old head from the sea and admire the haughty down-curved mouth that seems to disdain all the eyes are blind to, including me, the eater. Whole unto itself, complete without me, yet its shape complements the shape of my mind. I take it as text and evidence of the world’s love for me, and I feel urged to utterance, urged to read the body of the world, urged to say it in human terms, my reading a kind of eating, my eating a kind of reading, my saying a diminishment, my noise a love-in-answer. What is it in me would devour the world to utter it? What is it in me will not let the world be, would eat not just this fish, but the one who killed it, the butcher who cleaned it. I would eat the way he squats, the way he reaches into the plastic tubs and pulls out a fish, clubs it, takes it to the sink, guts it, drops it on the weighing pan. I would eat that thrash and plunge of the watery body in the water, that liquid violence between the man’s hands, I would eat the gutless twitching on the scales, three pounds of dumb nerve and pulse, I would eat it all to utter it. The deaths at the sinks, those bodies prepared for eating, I would eat, and the standing deaths at the counters, in the aisles, the walking deaths in the streets, the death-far-from-home, the death- in-a-strange-land, these Chinatown deaths, these American deaths. I would devour this race to sing it, this race that according to Emerson managed to preserve to a hair for three or four thousand years the ugliest features in the world.

I Is the total black, being spoken From the earth's inside. There are many kinds of open. How a diamond comes into a knot of flame How a sound comes into a word, coloured By who pays what for speaking. Some words are open Like a diamond on glass windows Singing out within the crash of passing sun Then there are words like stapled wagers In a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart— And come whatever wills all chances The stub remains An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge. Some words live in my throat Breeding like adders. Others know sun Seeking like gypsies over my tongue To explode through my lips Like young sparrows bursting from shell. Some words Bedevil me. Love is a word another kind of open— As a diamond comes into a knot of flame I am black because I come from the earth's inside Take my word for jewel in your open light.