872 Life poems

Waiting for your ride in front of the house where you spent the night, where, as a third ear during their endless intimate, important, and kinky phone calls, you pretended to rinse glassware; you were a dog from the pound, grateful, sniffing the upholstery. Later, lying in the center of their king-sized bed, a giant wall-to-wall mirror, isolating you like a rabbit; it was also their exercise room with torture equipment; something in you twitched; flickering a bizarre video in your head. It’s morning now. You’re standing outside, with nightgown and toothbrush wrapped in your purse, waiting for a bus to take you somewhere else. You’re depressed. They’re asleep of course. Their network wrapped around them. You keep wondering why you’re missing something. Then you look back and see your pricked-up ears, your waggy self, stuck inside their picture window, where for years it will wave at you—naive, apologetic, embarrassed.

Along a derelict railroad, abandoned machinery takes its last tour of duty toward rust. Another town is stalling. Another house smolders with rot while a television rages. Crows patrol banked cinders beside a landfill with a sign: No Dumping. We were Jews in Austria. No, we spoke German in Czechoslovakia—by order of the Alliance, we filed Into a railroad car and died. No, we were black in Arkansas. Here is a filthy contraption, like a grim lawn mower With flanged iron wheels,Pandrol Jackson in blue paint on its rotted housing: a rail grinder, used to polish steel To brilliance, forgotten here as after the Rapture. And the carcass of a boxcar warps just down the track, groaning with a cargo of bones.

It’s easy to make more of myself by eating, and sometimes easy’s the thing. To be double-me, half the trouble but not lonely. Making cakes to celebrate any old day. Eating too much: the emperor of being used. Nature, mature and feminized, naturalizes me naturally by creating the feeling of being a natural woman, like a sixteen-year-old getting knocked up again. To solve that problem, there’s the crispness of not eating, a pane of glass with a bloody-edged body, that is, having the baby at the prom undetected and, in a trance of self-preservation, throwing it away in the girls’ room trash. Buried under paper towels, silent. Nothing could be better, for the teenager. For me, starving, that coreless, useful feeling, is not making myself smaller but making myself bigger, inside. It’s prince and pauper both, it’s starving artist and good model in one masterpiece. It rhymes with marveling and that’s no accident. Fullness is dullness. Dreaming’s too easy. But sometimes I don’t care. Sometimes I put in just the right amount, but then I’m the worst kinds of patsy, a chump giving myself over to myself like a criminal to the law, with nothing to show for it. No reward, no news, no truth. It’s too sad to be so ordinary every day. Like some kind of employee. Being told what to do. Chop off a finger to plant in fertilizer (that is, in used animal food), to grow a finger tree. More fingers for me. Stop saying finger. I’m the one in charge here. Stop the madness and just eat the mirror. Put it in sideways or crush it into a powder. It doesn’t hurt and it works. Mouth full, don’t talk. Nothing to say. I’ll be a whole new person. I’ll make her myself. Then we’ll walk away. We’ll say to each other how she’s changed. How we wouldn’t have recognized us.

1 I held the framework of my life in mind with some precision. I knew when I was where — or where I was when — but not many incidents of my past had actually been preserved. Instead the frame served as a cargo cult runway, forever inviting the future to appear. I existed finally as the idea of temporal extension. 2 The creeper lineates the wall. Flowers as punctuation? Can you elaborate on the passage? Double meaning, superposition: hair standing on end makes a creature appear larger, more ferocious.

Like nearly all women under sixty she would have deftly avoided meeting the eyes of an unknown man— but occasionally an exception happens by chance and her unconscious skill at avoidance gets instantly replaced by a human generosity which is either inherently feminine or gender-trained, as you please; she glanced at me exactly when I glanced at her in the store at the mall and so she gave me that momentary slight smile which implies Though many men are dangerous, and I do not intend to suggest the slightest likelihood that you and I will meet or talk, much less make love and much less together conceive a sweet helpless child, still our eyes have just met and in this there is an undeniable contact between your humanity and mine and you are probably coping with some difficulties of masculine humanity while I cope with those of feminine humanity; and so I wish you well.

The man vending needles at our door Was lucky to greet you. He looked poor but you acted needle-poor Where I’d have said, I don’t need ... He sells needles to prick your heart And they’ll take small bites Out of my finger in a layer of skin Where my feelings are thin. The old thread knitting together his many wools Might last another trudge To our porch: he came last year but I Refused and barely looked him in the eye. I’ve lost how many needles since then? Besides he is mute And would see how dumb we are to buy Three hundred needles for relief. But he supplied us to the end of life. I’ll give away some. And you might never use these points That push through cloth, cut to be made one.

All seas are seas in the moon to these lonely and full of light. High above laundries and rooftops the pinstriped silhouettes speak nightmare as do the faces full of fire and orange peel. Every citizen knows what’s the trouble:America’s longest river is—New York; that’s w

I bring the cat’s body home from the vet’s in a running-shoe box held shut with elastic bands. Then I clean the corners where she has eaten and slept, scrubbing the hard bits of food from the baseboard, dumping the litter and blasting the pan with a hose. The plastic dishes I hide in the basement, the pee- soaked towel I put in the trash. I put the catnip mouse in the box and I put the box away, too, in a deep dirt drawer in the earth. When the death-energy leaves me, I go to the room where my daughter slept in nursery school, grammar school, high school, I lie on her milky bedspread and think of the day I left her at college, how nothing could keep me from gouging the melted candle-wax out from between her floorboards, or taking a razor blade to the decal that said to the firemen, “Break this window first.” I close my eyes now and enter a place that’s clearly expecting me, swaddled in loss and then losing that, too, as I move from room to bone-white room in the house of the rest of my life.

You died. And because you were Greek they gave you a coin to carry under your tongue and then also biscuits and honey. When you came to the riverbank you saw a crazy-looking black bumboat on the water with a figure standing in it, lanky and dressed darkly, holding a sweep. You were taken across, and you gave your coin for the passage, and continued until you came to a three-headed dog, who snarled and threatened you, even though you were not trying to escape. You gave him the biscuits smeared with honey, and you passed onward to the field of asphodel and through the gate of Tartarus. Or you died and you were Navajo. They had carried you out of the hogan earlier so you’d die in the sunshine. Or if it happened inside suddenly, they stuffed up the smokehole and boarded the front entrance, and cut an opening in the back, the north-facing, dark-facing side, to carry you out, and no one ever used that hogan again. They took off your moccasins and put them on again wrong side to, the left one on the right foot, the right on the left, so that your chindi would be confused and unable to return along your tracks. They washed your hair in suds made from the yucca. Then they gave you enough fried bread and water to last four days, and you set off on your journey. But actually none of these things happened. You just died.

I turned to speak to God, About the world’s despair; But to make bad matters worse, I found God wasn’t there. God turned to speak to me (Don’t anybody laugh) God found I wasn’t there— At least not over half. Originally appeared in the April 1936 issue of Poetry magazine.