Read Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals Online
Authors: Patricia Lockwood
How many sets of her parents are dead. How
many times over is she an orphan. A plane,
a crosswalk, a Boer war. A childbirth, of course,
her childbirth. When she, Shirley Temple, came
out of her mother, plump even at her corners
like a bag of goldfish, and one pinhole just one
pinhole necessary. Shirley Temple, cry for us,
and Shirley Temple cried. The first word of no
baby is “Hello,” how strange. The baby believes,
“I was here before you, learning to wave just
like the Atlantic.” Alone in the world
just like the Atlantic, and left on a doorstep
just like the Atlantic, wrapped in the grayest,
roughest blanket. Shirley Temple gurgled
and her first words were, “Your father is lost
at sea.” “Your mother was thrown by a foam-
colored horse.” “Your father's round face is
a round set of ripples.” “Every gull has a chunk
of your mom in its beak.”
Shirley Temple what makes you cry. What do
you think of to make you cry. Mommies stand
in a circle and whisper to her. “Shirley Temple
there will be war. Shirley Temple you'll get no
lunch.” Dry, and dry, and a perfect desert. Then:
“Shirley Temple your goldfish are dead,
they are swimming toward the ocean even now,”
and her tears they fall in black
and white, and her tears they star in the movie.
She cries so wet her hair uncurls, and then the rag
is in the ringlet and the curl is in the wave, she thinks
of dimples tearing out of her cheeks and just running,
out of cheeks knees and elbows and running hard
back to the little creamy waves where they belong,
and the ocean. Her first
glimpse of the ocean was a fake tear for dad.
A completely filled eye for her unseen dead father,
who when he isn't dead he is gone across the water.
One segment of a worm ago I was a swan,
I stank of the surface of lake just the surface
and I was a sight on the water. Why is it always
the swans, why is it never the stilts who turn
human, the stilts who would know how to walk
at least? I lift my webfoot for once and for all
and I try to climb one step, but a blubbery force-
field surrounds me now and I learn why human
women bounce: they're deeply encased in pink
rubber, so sad. The smell
of it, erasing! Erasing a picture
of what? Pink Pearl is written everywhere!
A bite mark on one end, a mouth of incisors
and molars and caninesâout of nowhere I know
the proper terms, I suddenly want to know every-
thing else, and whenever I felt that way on the lake
I simply ate a fish-head, but fish-heads won't fill
me now. Your attention is a fish-head,
so throw it back into my new body, back
into the body climbing the stairs. For ten years
writers loved phantom hands and wrote with
and about them nonstop, this particular writer
wrote, I quote,
“She lifted her phantom hand and she threw it
to the swans,” but where are all the writers who
had extra hands sewed on? Which hand should
get the pen? The one that never wrote a word
or the one that knows what to do? Is there one
that knows what to do, is this it? A grown girl
swan is called a what, the tips of my fingers
can almost touch it! You'll look it up when you
get homeâa recent transformation has no way
of knowing which wordplays are mostly
exhausted. My hair blows out behind me, where
my hair is attached to my head
I can feel a rushing
hot pivot, like where the wind changes direction.
I think that's where I begin to be dead, the best
part of this new bodyâbetter to be in one cell
of a swan! When I finally feel where these new
legs end,
I'll take two at a time to the top
of the stairs and two at a time back down,
and I'll walk to the lake and climb in a swanboat
and ride as a gizzard inside it.
Really, like a urine but even more gold,
I thought of that line and I felt it, even
between two legs I felt it, the legs I wrote
just now, a panic, a run-walk to the private
room with a picture of a woman
on the door, or else the line was long, too long,
I barged into the men's, and felt stares burning
hard like reading or noon, felt them looking
me up and over, felt them looking me over
and down, and all the while just holding their
pens,
they do it different oh no they don't,
they do it standing up, they do it at the window,
they do it so secret in a three-hour bath, they do it
aloud to someone else, their wife is catching
every word and every word is gold. What you eat
is in it, blackberries for breakfast are in it,
fat atoms of Shakespeare and Hitler are in it.
The sound of water makes me need to: Atlantic,
Pacific, Caspian, Black. I feel it so much because
I am pregnant, I am pregnant with a little self,
all of its self
is that spot on a dog that causes its leg to kick.
It kicked and I felt and I wrote that last line. Even
now it's happening. I eat only asparagus like arrows,
I am famous for my aim. I get almost none on my hands,
almost. Under my feet the streets, under the streets
the pipes. Inside the pipes a babble sound.
Doing what, I don't know, being alive. The green
of her is a scum on the surface, she would like
to look at herself. Should I have a memory?
she wonders. Of mother washing my frogskin
in muddy water? I do not have that memory.
My near-transparent frogskin? Mother washing
it with mud to keep it visible? I do not have that
memory, almost, almost. Warmblooded though
she knows for a fact, and spontaneously generated
from the sun on stone, and one hundred vertebrae in every
wave of the lake, as one hundred vertebrae in every wave
of her. All of her meat blue rare blue rare, a spot
on her neck that would drive her wild if anyone ever
touched it, and the tip of her tail ends with -ness and
-less. So far all she knows of the alphabet is signs
that say NO SWIMMING.
So far all she knows is her whereabouts.
Has great HATRED for the parochial, does the liver
of the lake. Would like to go to universe . . . al . . . ity?
She has heard there is a good one in Germany.
They stay up all night drinking some black sludge,
and grow long beards rather than look at them-
selves, and do thought experiments like: if I am not
in Scotland, does Scotland even exist? What do I look
like when no one is looking? She would listen to them
just as hard as she could with the mud-sucking holes
in her headâand they, she thinks, would listen back,
with their ears so regularly described as seashell.
The half of her that is underwater would like to be
under a desk, the head of her that is underwater
would like to be fully immersed.
I will be different there,
she thinks, with a powerful wake ahead of me.
When will the thinkers come for me. Visited only
here by believers. Is so deep-sea-sick of believers.
When will the thinkers come for me here, where
the green stretches out before me, and I am my own
front lawn. The green is a reflective green, a green
in the juicy shadows of leavesâa
bosky
even greenâ
a word I will learn to use, and use without self-
consciousness, when at last I go to Germany. I have
holed myself away here, sometimes I am not here
at all, and I feel like the nice clean hole in the leaf
and the magnifying glass above me.
She looks to the believers on the shore. A picture
it would last longer! shouts Nessie.
Does NOT believe photography can rise to the level
of art, no matter how much rain falls in it, as levels
of the lake they rose to art when Nessie dipped
her body in it. Nessie wants to watch herself doing
it. Doing what, I don't know, being alive. The lake
bought one Nessie and brought her home. She almost
died of loneliness until it gave her a mirror. The lake
could be a mirror, thinks Nessie. Would be perfectly
still if I weren't in it.
In the cities all the poets, and in all the cities,
bedbugs. Fat with their black lyric blood! Alive
at only night, and there and then not there. Better
bedbugs than the ones that eat paper, say poetsâ
the ones that eat paper are in our blood
and the bedbugs eat them up, rip rip, and our paper
creamily goes on whole, with not a single real space
between sentences in it. They say come to the cities
and there
become Great! The poets have money to spend
in the cities: they spend the newest American dollars,
the crisp-aired greenest American dollars, blazing
with pictures of National Parks. “The Old Faithful
Geyser almost gushes off the note!” At last money admits
the power of poetry, at last money admits it is written
onâand this piece of paper almost gushes, so go to a city
and spend it. The poets in cities save their money
and travel to National Parks, and never sleep at night
there, no one sleeps in a National Park, they stay up late
and inseminate each other with memories of mountains
and glimpses of wildlife, and human reflections in stilly
chill lakes, and afterward they lie awake, miles away
from any city, miles away from their living mattresses
where their absent shapes are getting sucked
for their blood. Oh the bedbugs are happy; in bedbug prison,
the locked-up poet is writing his poems, in blood just like
the first time. Oh the poets are happy back in the cities, there
are legible smears on their sheets every day, and a pricking
always on their skin like something is coming
for them through the grass, long green grass
of where they came from.
Is the last man alive on this earth. He has the cities
to himself, and even has the blondes, who are over
his shoulders not kicking or screaming. He carries
them wherever he carries the gorilla. “I can see straight
through and past your mask,” the gorilla-suit actor
tells himself. “I can see your eyes twinkle way up
with the stars. Between two skyscrapers I can see them.
By the end the audience will recognize you. By the end
they will see you as one of them, by the end they will see
their faces in your face,”
and the audience feels themselves lifted up too,
and the audience leaves one by one. “Where is the movie,
where is my movie?” the gorilla cries in despair. He beats
his bass chest, there is only silence. He opens his mouth
and makes the loud frightened music the score makes
when we first see him. He is taller than even he remembers.
Comets streak through and through his head. All the blondes
are thrown over his shoulders, the blondes he never even
liked, the bunches of blondes he mistook for bananas. What
he likes is the Chrysler Building, all nipped and shirred
at the waist. What he likes is the cool copper Statue of Liberty.
What he likes, getting bigger, is that high-heeled continent.
What he likes, he thinks, sweat dripping sky to the ground,
is the great gorilla-suit itself and its long great line of inhabitants.
The late great is alone, is alone on the earth. The sun approaches
hotter than hot, the last and screamingest of the blondes.
The last of the great is as big as deep space, the last of the late
is as big as the night, he reaches out and grabs the sun, he is
stuffed with the stars of gorilla-suit acting, all gorilla-suit
actors are moving his arms, all gorilla-suit actors are moving
his legs, and we make the sad music the score makes
when the gorilla is shot full of holes, and “Remember me!”
we cry to no one at large, and burst out of the suit at last
to breathe, last of the late great gorilla-suit actions.
We are watching a crayon being made, we are children,
we are watching the crayon become crayons
and more crayons and thinking how can there be enough
room in America to make what makes it up, we are thinking
all America is a factory by now, the head of it churning out
fake oranges, the hand of it churning out glass bottles,
the heel of it churning out Lego men.
We are watching lifelike snakes get made, we are watching
lifelike rats get made, we are watching army men get made;
a whole factory for magic wands, a whole factory
for endless scarves, a whole factory, America, for the making
of the doves, a whole factory, America,
for the making of long-eared
rabbits and their love of deep dark holes. We are watching
a marble being made, how does the cat's eye get in the marble
and how does the sight get into that, how does the hand get
on it, how does the hand attach to the child, how does the child
attach to the dirt, and how does the dirt attach to its only name,
America. The name is manufactured here by rows of me in airless
rooms. Sunlight is accidental, sunlight is runoff
from the lightbulb factory, is ooze on the surface of all our rivers.
Our abandoned factories make empty space and our largest
factory produces distance and its endless conveyor produces miles.
And people in the basement produce our underground. Hillbilly
teeth are made here, but hillbilly teeth are made everywhere
maybe. The factory that makes us is overseas, and meanwhile we,
America, churn out China, France, Russia, Spain, and our glimpses
of them from across the ocean. Above the factory billowing clouds
can be seen for miles around. Long line of us never glances up
from the long line of glimpses we're making, we could make
those glimpses in the dark, our fingertips could see to do it,
all the flashing fish in the Finger Lakes
have extra-plus eyes in America. The last factory, which makes last
lines, makes zippers for sudden reveals: a break in the trees opens
ziiiip on a view, the last line opens ziiiip on enormous meaning.