872 Life poems

I was listening to a book on tape while driving and when the author said, “Those days I delighted in everything,” I pulled over and found a pencil and a parking ticket stub because surely there was a passage of life where I thought “These days I delight in everything,” right there in the present, because they almost all feel like that now, memory having markered only the outline while evaporating the inner anxieties of earlier times. Did I not disparage my body for years on end, for instance, although, in contrast that younger one now strikes me as near-Olympian? And the crushing preoccupations of that same younger self might seem magically diluted, as though a dictator in hindsight, had only been an overboard character — but not so. Where went the fear, dense as the sudden dark in the woods, of being alone, or the bruise of 3:30 pm in a silent apartment, when the disenfranchised live only with the sunlight through the blinds, just prey caught betwixt and between, and also heartbreak, and again, heartbreak. I didn’t have whatever that time of life then demanded — a book, a wedding band, a baby — but the present, like the lie of “fair and balanced” news reporting where creationists are granted air time with the scientists, the present might have me believe that “in those days I delighted in everything.” But to be ... fair and balanced ... I do trust the strict part of memory, the only archivist to have savored a passage of time and have preserved it with the translucent green hinges licked by stamp collectors, attaching it without hurting it, so I wanted the quote exactly, and go back to hunt and tag those months where I delighted in everything — then I couldn’t find the ticket stub. I rummaged through the recycling but no luck, and I couldn’t go back to find the passage on tape, and then I realized I had bought the book for my husband, so I started leafing through it, not wanting to start too far back, and not wanting my eyes to fall on a passage in the future, the one where she realizes that “Those days I delighted in everything,” but it was never to happen again, just the present, from here on in.

Small red tin box sealed in shrink-wrap, cut open with pocketknife, pried apart, its goods aerate the office. I pluck white sliced chalky cylinders; let them simmer in my mouth. I exhale peppermint scent through my nose. Cut open the official letter. A map in letters on a white page. My teeth grind mints. Photocopies slightly off alignment, I blur lines. Equations disperse family through land documents, position each generation. I am only fourth in line. Some plots are gumbo after winter thaw. Sections stitched together with extended relatives. This ritual, personal death papers drafted. I am partial to this grassland; the place of deer marks and porcupine quills, ledger extrapolates history. I refold estate document, place it back into its envelope.

Prologue Willy Loman’s reckless daughter flies quietly, fluttering like a silk-moth behind me blocking my life, my scenes in whichever stage direction she wants. Sometimes at night I can feel her dialing into me, her ringing calls like an imperial decree. When she sleeps she crashes, like a car into the guardrail of my ambition. Her curse like a poison I cannot smell, an asphyxiation of the self by the self, that hell and hard sell. Split personalities, we dream through the night, of our merger and acquisition, in her half-moon light, Not even my husband can feel her there between us—a secret contract under seal. When I awaken, her irises touch mine; an awful, indecipherable fault line. She’s a character in search of an author, a devotee, trying to recount her history through me, until I channel her. She’s like a phantom limb, hymn to the invisible. Her shameless whims, the subtext of my lies. Under her tinted hair the forest murmurs, becomes a thought, or prayer. Until her thoughts tumble into mine; colors bleed. In the morning, I’m overwrought— My patrilineal kin, she begins to wear thin, when she undoes hospital corners I’ve tucked so gently in. Her cool white rising is meringue completing— the high-pitched silence of our congealing. She was always ceremonially unfolding his white shirts, unpressing the folds in my circumstance. I did and didn’t want her. I kept trying to catch her, then let her slip. Any intent to have her near made her more invisible. Her electric breasts overfilled my brassieres. An interaction, our dialectic— She never removes her hat upon entering the door to my personality. Ma semblable, ma soeur!

For I have loved the blade with all my crippled with all my awkward soul loved it for the shine sheen for the ease and grace of doing what it was made to do for I have loved the stubborn womb its beloved intent have loved the hope and then learned to love the lack for I have loved the water the way it comes to me comes for me in all its liquid mystery for I have loved what the water loves its myriad vessels sky basin runnel channel and vein for all it claims and contains for I have loved its muscular flex its rise coil and fall so like Leviathan's mighty desperate heart for I have loved Leviathan for being only for being exactly what god hated and what he made for being water's own knife this wild unholy blade

(Independence Day, 1964) On her 36th birthday, Thomas had shown her her first swimming pool. It had been his favorite color, exactly—just so much of it, the swimmers’ white arms jutting into the chevrons of high society. She had rolled up her window and told him to drive on, fast. Now this act of mercy: four daughters dragging her to their husbands’ company picnic, white families on one side and them on the other, unpacking the same squeeze bottles of Heinz, the same waxy beef patties and Salem potato chip bags. So he was dead for the first time on Fourth of July—ten years ago had been harder, waiting for something to happen, and ten years before that, the girls like young horses eyeing the track. Last August she stood alone for hours in front of the T.V. set as a crow’s wing moved slowly through the white streets of government. That brave swimming scared her, like Joanna saying Mother, we’re Afro-Americans now! What did she know about Africa? Were there lakes like this one with a rowboat pushed under the pier? Or Thomas’ Great Mississippi with its sullen silks? (There was the Nile but the Nile belonged to God.) Where she came from was the past, 12 miles into town where nobody had locked their back door, and Goodyear hadn’t begun to dream of a park under the company symbol, a white foot sprouting two small wings.

This is what it sounds like outside, fat geese and guinea hens holding hands. I am 31, which is very young for my age. That is enough to realize I’m a pencil that has learned how to draw the Internet. I explain squiggles diagramming exactly how I feel and you are drawn to read in ways you cannot yet. Slow goes the drag of creation, how what’s within comes to be without, which is the rhythmic erection of essence. Life’s little deaths, petite orgasms, as the French nearly said but never came to. Feathers outstrip the weather as we stand with binoculars inquiring how winged creatures can hold their blood to warmth without a proper insulation system overlaying circulation. That is, sans fat and simple wooden bones with hair glued on. Mostly though they pulsate on the horizons of backlit vision, where we only meet the subways with handshakes, the rainbow filters of downloaded electronica, the telephone poles as archaic checkpoints to past cultures. They don’t have screens to seek their cues in. We drift from one culture to another and fight the stitcheries of racism, classism, anti-Muslim terrorists among us, with overlaps in the complete dis-ease our bodies settle into for next to no resistance. So we create something else. As in, roughshod moments of fake hate will position a fluid hello of death rattles that settle for the injunction of existence and state: Here am I made manifest by not being you, by not going in the same unsteady destination, by not asking the questions or repeating the paintings that came before me, by not singing in the register of  your bubble baths as you hug that person close in a wish to outlast bullets, even as the light leaves your eyes just a little next time we overlap paths. So the hens and geese make us think in terms of help outside, how they flap and move with fat ease in front of trains, across the chopping block, to the hungry winters of final leviathans, even as they land just so on the wires above us, and we go on complaining, murderous, too far out, unspoken.

I ask not wit, nor beauty do I crave, Nor wealth, nor pompous titles wish to have; But since, 'tis doomed through all degrees of life, Whether a daughter, sister, or a wife; That females should the stronger males obey, And yield implicit to their lordly sway; Since this, I say, is ev'ry woman's fate, Give me a mind to suit my slavish state.

It wouldn't kill me to find new frequencies in a temper tantrum. Tatamis and memory, magnetized selves becoming heavy. Of what is a scream composed? You may want to know. You may want to know why. It is to these arabesques that the birdsong replies. Copula, disappear. Anguish, multifoliate. I am a brother to a wandering prayer. Orb in ruined loop fluting for a lost future. I grab what is left of pistons bouncing across a street. The barricade is foolproof.

I Beginnings: a chrysalis improvisation in the wings, roles taking on flesh before a role begins… as light begins in the elm, pushing the long elm branches into night, a ghost light pressing sky… or actors, swollen with strange selves, distended to the edges of tight skin, a brightness under moth-wing fingertips. White arms stretch out toward truth. The stage is full of light. Your brightness gloves my skin. II Alice, grown huge, swollen to fit of the tunnels, tiny, unable to reach a gold key, knew what gardens were for— yet never knelt in tunnels of rough sunlight to will flamboyance from green buds. The swollen poppy twists within its cap, a pink invention wrestling light. How often I think of tunneling roots, curtains of roots, white ropes that stroked our hair when we entered tunnels. Here, we are rubbed on gold. This wedge of pink beginnings troubles gardens. III A robin listens to darkness. I think of worms, grubs, moles, the slow ballet of rootlets twisting down, of cave fish, blacksnakes, and, asleep at Nieux, the great black bulls that thunder on dark walls. When we wear another self, do our souls darken? On a bright stage, do we enter darkest places? IV There is darkness clinging to the undersides of leaves. For we are entering darkness. It skuffs along cave walls, stumbling and skuffing fingertips. At Mycenae, it is a heavy must, a musty heavy breath in the hundred-step cistern. They wait, dark passageways in old houses, their worn silence frayed under a blur of footsteps. Our stretched-out hands manipulate evasive cellar shadows. Within the garden, silence darkens windblown leaves. V Oh I think of Alice gone down, down under groundcover dreams, a man’s tunneled night. Who are these actors? On dream stages, I forget lines. My tongue-tied silence foundering…     Stage props mumble rigidities.        The audience… I think of silences at Nieux, at Mycenae, the tourists gone, guides returned to wives, houses…. And those silences of capricious light. The calex splits, an abrupt pink flame. Orpheus’ torch descends and still descends through arias of reddest blossom.

Nights, by the light of whatever would burn: tallow, tinder and the silken rope of wick that burns slow, slow we wove the baskets from the long gold strands of wheat that were another silk: worm soul spun the one, yellow seed in the dark soil, the other. The fields lay fallow, swollen with frost, expectant winter. Mud clung to the edges of our gowns; we had hung back like shadows on the walls of trees and watched. In the little circles that our tapers threw, murdered men rose red in their clanging armor, muttered words that bled through the bars of iron masks:the lord who sold us to the glory fields, lied.