Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2 page)

Discover the power at age eleven. Discover all powers

at age eleven. A kittenhead struggles out of your face

and the kittenhead mews MILK, you gasp with its

mouth and it slurps itself back. Yet the mew for MILK

remains, you drink it. You think, “I am an Animorph.”

Your sight and your hearing increase, like wheat

and the wind in the wheat. Well you've never seen

any wheat but it sounds good, to you and your new

trembling ears. Blue sky increases above the wheat

and you know what it's like to grow a . . . well.

A hawk's is between two legs but much higher.

Halfway to any animal is where you like

to be. Get halfway there and have just the instinct,

the instinct that someone's approaching. Stripes

begin to form, are always a surprise, you look

down and you move your head left to right and then

the meaning comes. English get worse but not much

in your muzzle, English get worse but not much

in your mouth. You walk to school and sit next

to a girl who was born with a tail and you copy off

her. You rub your temples when they ache, rub any

of your body when it aches, you seem to be only

a series of places where animal parts could emerge.

Soon you will be a teenager, and soon you will be

so greasy, and how you can hardly wait, because:

its grease makes the animal graceful, and go. You go

to the petting zoo with your class and timidly reach

in a hand. Turn to a donkey and finally

feel your lashes are long enough. Turn to a horse

and finally feel that your eyes are so meltingly human.

Walk home on your own through the fields and the fields,

and the increase of wheat and the wind in it, and think

of the life that stretches before you: work your way

through all the animals, and come to the end of them,

and what? And turn to crickets, and make no noise?

One tear struggles out of your face, but no that's not

a tear. “I fuckin eat crickets,” your kittenhead says,

“I fuckin eat silence of crickets for fun. I got life after

life and a name like Baby. Every time I try to cry a tear

a new kittenhead grows out of me.” And oh how you

are lifted, then,

the kittenhead of you in the high hawk hold.

I am waiting for the day when the Hatfields

and McCoys finally become interesting to me,

when they flare with significance at last as if

they'd been written in Early Times Whiskey

and the match of my sight had been flicked

and was racing now along them, and racing

like a line to their houses—who wasted

all this whiskey, and now everything is lit up:

how they hid behind trunks of oaks, and hid

behind herds of cows, how they aimed like teats

at each other and shot death in a straight white

line; I will learn how it began, probably over

a . . .
gal
, or McCoy gave a Hatfield an unfair

grade for a paper about mammals he worked

really hard on, and his dad to whom grades

were life and death kindled a torch in the night,

and burned her grading hand to ashes along

with all the rest of her, but her name McCoy

escaped from the fire and woke up in seven

brothers. I will learn how

their underdrawers fought each other while

hanging on the line, how socks disappeared

from their pairs, how new mailmen were killed

every day touching poisoned postcards they sent

to each other, which said things like Wish you

WERENT
here, and
GOODBYE
from sunny Spain,

I will learn precise numbers of people who died

and where they put all the bodies, under the garden

maybe, where they helped grow blood-red carrots

that longed to lodge in enemy throats,

where they helped grow brooding tomatoes

that were still considered deadly back then, as part

of the nightshade family. Two of their babies

fell in love, because love comes earlier for people

who live in the past and the mountains,

and when they turned one year old

they were told they were Hatfields and McCoys,

and one locked his lips grimly on a breast that night

and drank milk until he died, the other took an entire

bottle of Doctor Samson's Soothing Syrup for Crybaby

Boys, two-hundred-proof I read somewhere, and his throat went

whoosh
and he died too. Who was the final McCoy

or Hatfield? He says point a gun at me, then maybe

I'll know where I am. What else, I will learn

what year it was, and lift my head from reading

a full year later, finished with Hatfields and McCoys,

my sight on fire will have gutted their houses, the line

of old whiskey will have ended here now.

Of all living monuments has the fewest

facts attached to it, they slide right off

its surface, no Lincoln lap for them to sit

on and no horse to be astride. Here is what

I know for sure:

Was a gift from one city to another. A city

cannot travel to another city, a city cannot visit

any city but itself, and in its sadness it gives

away a great door in the air. Well

a city cannot
except for Paris
, who puts

on a hat styled with pigeon wings and walks

through the streets of another city and will not

even see the sights, too full she is of the sights

already. And within her walk her women,

and the women of Paris looking like

they just walked through an Arch . . .

Or am I mixing it up I think I am

with another famous female statue? Born

in its shadow and shook-foil hot the facts

slid off me also. I and the Arch we burned

to the touch. “Don't touch that Arch a boy

we know got third-degree burns from touch-

ing that Arch,” says my mother sitting

for her statue. She is metal on a hilltop and

so sad she's not a Cross. She was long ago

given to us by Ireland. What an underhand

gift for an elsewhere to give, a door

that reminds you you can leave it. She raises

her arm to brush my hair. Oh no female

armpit lovelier than the armpit of the Arch.

Just as he fell in love with the dinosaurs,

just as he would fall in love with the moon—

no women in the world yet, he was only ten

years old. A ten-year-old is made of time,

the world had forever to learn about Egypt.

He entered encyclopedias and looted every

fact of them and when he had finished looting

there he broke into the Bible. He snuck

into his mother's room and drew thick lines

around his eyes and those were the borders

of Egypt. He carefully wrote in stiff small

birds, he carefully wrote in coiled snakes,

he carefully wrote in flatfooted humans.

The ten-year-old world needed so much

privacy, he learned to draw the door-bolt

glyph and learned to make the sound

it made. I am an old white British man,

decided the ten-year-old world, I wear a round

lens on my right eye, the Day, and see only a blur

with my left eye, the Night. When the sun shone

on him it shone on Egypt, all the dark for a while

was the dark in the Pyramids, the left lung

of his body was the shape of Africa

and one single square breath in it Egypt.

They never found all the tombs, he
knew
. Anyone

might be buried in Egypt, thought the ten-year-old

world in love with it, I will send my wind down

into my valley, and my wind will uncover the doors

to the tombs, and I will go down myself inside them,

and shine light on all the faces, and light on the rooms

full of gold, and light on even the littlest pets, on the mice

and the beetles of the ten-year-old kings, and shine light

on even their littlest names.

First there was Helen of Sparta, who did it only

with oil, no one knows how; then there was

Maggie of England, who even on the battlefield

put men back together; and then there was Rose

of the deepest South, who stood up in her father's

clothes and walked out of the house and herself.

Disguised women were always among them.

They badly wanted to wear blue, they badly

wanted to wear red, they wanted to blend

with the woods or ground. Together

with men they were blown from their pronouns.

Their faces too were shot off which were then

free of their bodies. “I never had any dolls I only

had soldiers. I played soldier from the minute

I was born. Dropped my voice down almost

into the earth, wore bandages where I didn't

need them, was finally discovered by the doctor,

was finally discovered at the end.”

Someone thought long and hard how to best

make my brother blend into the sand. He came

back and he was heaped up himself like a dune,

he was twice the size of me, his sight glittered

deeper in the family head, he hid among himself,

and slid, and stormed, and looked the same

as the next one, and was hot and gold and some-

where else.

My brother reached out his hand to me and said,

“They should not be over there. Women should not

be over there.” He said, “I watched people burn

to death. They burned to death in front of me.”

A week later his red-haired friend killed himself.

And even his name was a boy's name: Andrew.

A friend writes to him, “My dress blues are being

altered for a bloodstripe.” That's a beautiful line,

I can't help hearing. “Kisses,” he writes to a friend.

His friend he writes back, “Cuddles.” Bunch of girls,

bunch of girls. They write each other, “Miss you,

brother.” Bunch of girls, bunch of girls. They passed

the hours with ticklefights. They grew their mustaches

together. They lost their hearts to local dogs,

what a bunch of girls.

I sent my brother nothing in the desert because

I was busy writing poems. Deciding one by one

where the breath commas went, or else it would

not stand and walk. This was going to be a poem

about release from the body. This was going

to be a poem about someone else, maybe even me.

My brother is alive because of a family capacity

for little hairs rising on the back of the neck.

The night the roadside bomb blew up, all three

sisters dreamed of him. There, I just felt it,

the family capacity. My brother is alive because

the family head sometimes hears a little voice.

I had been writing the poem before the boy died.

It then did not seem right to mention that burn means

different things in different bodies. I was going

to end the poem with a line about the grass. But

they were in the desert, and I was in the desert when

I thought about them, and no new ending appeared

to me. I was going to write, “The hill that they died on

was often a woman, wearing the greatest uniform of war,

which is grass.” I know my little brother's head. The scalp

is almost green, where the hair is shortest. I know

my little brother's head, and that is where the ending

lives, the one that sends the poem home, and makes grass

stand up on the back of the neck, and fits so beautiful

no one can breathe—the last words live

in the family head, and let them live in there a while.

Once babies were born as Garys

and no one doubted what they were, and they were

true men, these babies,

with dangle, and the very name

Gary it had the sound of exposing itself to you. Each

Gary made a fine crowd noise, each Gary was a Crowd

to cheer his death-defying loop-de-loops, and each Gary

went wild when he did not die, one Gary after another

in a loud unbroken line. But was somewhere born a baby

named Gary, sometime in the last fifteen years? Not one,

says the Living Record. Not at two o'clock in the morning,

not at three o'clock in the afternoon, and Gary sounds to us

now the way ORVILLE must have sounded in 1950: a man

in the brand-new days of the car saying Haw and Gee

to his Ford, he can't help it, so recent did the horseflank

twitch beneath the fly. What Garys are still alive are gray,

they ask to hold our newborns and the rest of the family

looks on afraid. If the infants are dropped and broken

they will make a sick overripe sound: Gary. Now just

one minute I interrupt, my father had that name,

I don't believe a word of this, except for the honest

word Gary. When he had it the name was in fullest flower

and perfectly a name of the now, and he shot wiggling

seconds into my mom and one of them plumped and grew

bigheaded, and he named me he couldn't help it Orange,

and my life was a film as long as my life of my name growing

mold in real time. I was part of a picnic basket, and packed

for a family trip, for a family trip to where, the past, and Gary

was a canyon there, and the babies of the past tumbled into him

happily, and the sunset into him was famous, and up and down

his sides grew the freshest wildest four o'clocks.