478 Identity poems

I was born in minutes in a roadside kitchen a skillet whispering my name. I was born to rainwater and lye; I was born across the river where I was borrowed with clothespins, a harrow tooth, broadsides sewn in my shoes. I returned, though it please you, through no fault of my own, pockets filled with coffee grounds and eggshells. I was born still and superstitious; I bore an unexpected burden. I gave birth, I gave blessing, I gave rise to suspicion. I was born abandoned outdoors in the heat-shaped air, air drifting like spirits and old windows. I was born a fraction and a cipher and a ledger entry; I was an index of first lines when I was born. I was born waist-deep stubborn in the water crying ain’t I a woman and a brother I was born to this hall of mirrors, this horror story I was born with a prologue of references, pursued by mosquitoes and thieves, I was born passing off the problem of the twentieth century: I was born. I read minds before I could read fishes and loaves; I walked a piece of the way alone before I was born.

i was born at the rupture the root where i split from my parallel self  i split from the girl i also could have been & her name / easy / i know the story all her life / my mother wanted a girl named for a flower whose oil scents all our mothers / petals wrung for their perfume i was planted land became ocean became land anew its shape refusing root in my fallow mouth cleaving my life neatly & my name / taken from a dead woman to remember / to fill an aperture with cut jasmine in a bowl our longing our mothers’ wilting garlands hanging from our necks

Naked before the glass she said, “I see my body as no man has, Nor any shall unless I wed And naked in a stranger’s house Stand timid beside his bed. There is no pity in the flesh.” “Or else I shall grow old,” she said, “Alone, and change my likeliness For a vile, slack shape, a head Shriveled with thinking wickedness Against the day I must be dead And eaten by my crabbed wish.” “One or the other way,” she said, “How shall I know the difference, When wrinkles come, to spinster or bride? Whether to marry or burn is bless- ed best, O stranger to my bed, There is no pity in the flesh.”

I was wondering why that guy wore the blanket coat, bone choker, rock watch, woven buckle, quilled Stetson— I was wondering why he wore that beaded vest, like a ledger drawing or a Winter Count, its skinny figure forever sneaking after two bison around belly to back, around back to belly— I was wondering why, when he said, I wear these getups every day— Every day, because these things are sacred, these things are prayer. Then I knew I could live this life If I had blue horses painted around and around me, shells and beads like rain in my ear praying Prairie open in me at stoplight, hard city, last call, bank line, coffee break, shopping cart, keycode, Prarie open in me Prarie open in me every day every day every day.

What land have you cast from the blotted-out region of your face? What nation stung by watermarks was filmed out of extinction and brought forth resembling frost? What offspring must jump through the eye of birth to be winked at when covered with brick sweat? What ache piled its planks on the corner pier, now crumbles onto motionless water, sniffed at by forest smoke? What makes this song a string of beads seized by cement cracks when the camera climbs through the basement window—winter clouds coiling through its speckled lens? What season cannot locate an eye in the dark of the sound of the sun gyrating into red ocher after I thought you noticed my language was half wren, half pigeon and, together, we spoke a wing pattern on the wall that was raised to keep “us” out, there where “calling” became “culling,” “distance” distanced, in a mere scrape of enamel on yellow teeth? What father woke, turned over his wife, she didn’t want to, but he pushed until the baby leapt through, now, now, now, strummed into a chorus of burn marks on ceilings where police sirens fruit magpie skulls on trees of monsoon lightning? What, what, what—is how that song chimed in wilderness.

He will not light long enough for the interpreter to gather the tatters of his speech. But the longer we listen the calmer he becomes. He shows me the place where his daughter has rubbed with a coin, violaceous streaks raising a skeletal pattern on his chest. He thinks he’s been hit by the wind. He’s worried it will become pneumonia.

When I was a boy In Looziana, We wore blue jeans And a red bandanna. My folks moved up To the state of Maine, We wore duck shoes In slicker-suit rain. My folks moved down To the state of Texas, We wore brand names Like Lazy X’s. Now that we’re living It up in Vermont, We wear pretty much Whatever we want.

Is that your house he asked This used to be my house I said But those are not your people So that can’t be your house But it is my house I said I had some people maybe a few Even though those are not your people Even though they don’t look like you I had to live somewhere I said This is the house where I lived But where are your people he said My people live in a different house They don’t care to know about me If you’re the devil Why are you asking me questions The devil said since the house You had to live in is gone I thought you’d be happy It sure is a hot day I said Of course it is said the devil Why do you think I work in town

the white of your skin, for skin, except when truly albino, always has some other color sleeping within it—a hint of red maple leaf, a touch of the blue ice at the edge of a melting stream, a richness implied of its many layers, the deltas of cells and blood, that deep fecundity that lies within and makes the skin shed, not like a snake, but as a tree (one of those golden cottonwoods flaring just now at the edge of the river) that sheds its leaves each moment while an eternity of leaf remains. Oh, nothing seems to me as white as your skin, all your languid ease of being—one resting upon the other, the sliver of your shoulder against the black fabric—reminds me so of the lost realm of beauty that I am afraid of nothing, and only dazed (as I was that day at the aquarium when the beluga whales came swimming toward me—how white they were, slipping out of the darkness, radiant and buoyant as silence and snow, incandescent as white fire, gliding through the weight of water, and when they sang in that chamber as small as the chambers of the human heart, murky with exhaustion and captivity and the fragments of what they had consumed, I was almost in love with them; they seemed the lost children of the moon, carrying in their milky mammalian skins a hint of glacial ice and singing to each other of all the existences they had left behind, their fins like the wings of birds or angels, clicking and whistling like canaries of the sea:there was no darkness in their bodies, like clouds drifting through unkempt skies, they illuminated the room). So I did not think of you so much as I felt you drifting through my being, in some gesture that held me poised like a hummingbird above the scarlet blossoms of the trumpet vine, I kissed you above the heart, and by above I mean there, not that geometric center, the breastbone that so many use to divide the body in half and so mistake for the place where the heart lies, but the exact location, a little to the left, just on the crescent where the breast begins to rise; oh, I know all that drift of white implies, the vanished clothing, the disappearing room, that landscape of the skin and night that opens in imagination and in feeling upon a sea of snow, so that just one kiss above the heart is a kiss upon the heart, as if one could kiss the very pulse of being, light upon the head of that pin that pins us here, that tiny disk where angels were once believed to dance, and all that nakedness without could not have been except for all that burning deep within

My head knocks against the stars. My feet are on the hilltops. My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life. Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny. I have been to hell and back many times. I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God. I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible. I know the passionate seizure of beauty And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading "Keep Off." My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.