My breasts hardening with milk—little seeps
leaking into the folded husband
hankies set into the front curves
of the nursing harness—I would wander around
the quiet apartment when her nap would last a little
longer than usual. When she was awake, I was
purpose, I was a soft domestic
prowling of goodness—only when she slept
was I free to think the thoughts of one
in bondage. I had wanted to be someone—not just
someone’s mom, but someone, some
one.
Yet I know that this work that I did with her
lay at the heart of what mattered to me—was
that heart. And still there was a part of me
left out by it, as if exposed on a mountain
by mothering. And when she slept in,
I smelled the husks of olive rind
on that slope, I heard the blue knock
of the eucalyptus locket nut, I
tasted the breath of the wolf seeking
the flesh to enrich her milk, I saw the
bending of the cedar under the sea
of the wind—while she slept, it was as if
my pierced ankles loosed themselves
and I walked like a hunter in the horror-joy
of the unattached. Girl of a mother,
mother of a girl, I paced, listening,
almost part-fearing, sometimes, that she might have stopped
breathing, knowing nothing was anything, for me,
next to the small motions as she woke,
light and wind on the face of the water.
And then that faint cry, like a
pelagic bird, who sleeps in flight, and I would
turn, pivot on a spice-crushing heel,
and approach her door.
In the back of the drawer, in the sack, the baby
canines and incisors are mostly chaff,
by now, no whole utensils left:
half an adze; half a shovel—in its
handle, a marrow well of the will
to dig and bite. And the enamel hems
are sharp as shell-tools, and the colors go
from salt, to pee on snow. One cuspid
is like the tail of an ivory chough,
I think it’s our daughter’s, but the dime hermes
mingled the chompers of our girl and boy, safe-
keeping them together with the note that says
Der Toth Farry, Plees Giv Me
A Bag Of Moany.
I pore over the shards
like a skeleton lover—but who could throw out
these short pints of osseous breast-milk,
or the wisdom, with its charnel underside,
and its dome, smooth and experienced,
ground in anger, rinsed in silver
when the mouth waters. From above, its knurls
are a cusp-ring of mountaintops
around an amber crevasse, where in high
summer the summit wildflowers open
for a day—Crown Buttercup, Alpine Flames,
Shooting Star, Rosy Fairy Lantern,
Cream Sacs, Sugar Scoop.
It is an art, a craft, a kind of Home
Ec, slowly pulling out the small
rubber dome, this time almost
full of blackish blood. It is
like war, or surgery, without weapons
or instruments. The darkness of it
has the depth of truth. The clots are shocking and
thrilling in their shapes. I do what some
might do in their last days, knowing they will
never have another chance,
I rub my palms with it, and I want
to go across my face once, in ritual
streaks, but my glasses are on, and I’m in
a slight panic, seeing my reddened
life-lines. For a moment, while I still can,
I want to eat a dot of it,
but not the bitterness of spermicide,
or a sperm dead of spermicide.
Many millions have been killed today—
I hold my hands out to the mirror
over the sink, a moment, like a killer
showing her nature. Then left hand
to hot, right to cold, I turn on
the taps. And blood turns out to be flecks
suspended in water, the washy down
of a red hen. I feel that the dead
would be glad to come back for one moment of this,
in me the dead come back for a moment
to the honor and glory.
On the ten-below-zero day, it was on,
the round-shouldered heater near the analyst’s couch,
at its end, like the child’s headstone which appeared
a year later, in the neighboring plot, near
the foot of my father’s grave. And it was hot, with the
laughing satire of a fire’s heat,
the little coils like hairs in Hell.
And it was making a group of sick noises—
I wanted the doctor to turn it off
but I couldn’t seem to ask, so I just
stared, but it did not budge. The doctor
turned his heavy, soft palm
outward, toward me, inviting me to speak, I
said, “If you’re cold—are you cold? But if it’s on
for me …” He held his palm out toward me,
I tried to ask, but I only muttered,
but he said, “Of course,” as if I had asked,
and he stood and approached the heater, and then
stood on one foot, and threw himself
toward the wall with one hand, and with the other hand
reached down behind the couch, to pull
the plug out. I looked away,
I had not known he would have to bend
like that. And I was so moved, that he
would act undignified, to help me,
that I cried, not trying to stop, but as if
the moans made sentences which bore
some human message. If he would cast himself toward the
outlet for me, as if bending with me
in some old shame, then I would put my trust
in his art—and the heater purred, like a creature
or the familiar of a creature, or the child of a familiar,
the father of a child, the spirit of a father,
the healing of a spirit, the vision of healing,
the heat of vision, the power of the heat,
the pleasure of the power.
The execution building at each
prison is nicknamed after the
equipment it houses.
In a pan of Joy and cold boiled water
lay the gloves I’d picked up, for some reason, off the street, in the sleet—
one large left, one huge right,
like gauntlets of centurions. I ran
in more hot, and coils of wool
surged out, tar pellets, facets of glass,
and there at the bottom was the six-inch spike I had
lifted from the excavation site.
And the spike was too heavy for its four-sided length
and thickness, like a piece of railroad steel
sixteen ounces on its home planet,
16 tons here. It had
a wavy shape, as if poured when hot, and we have
heard the scream when such a nail
is pulled from a human hoof. And the shaft looked
bitten, and the tip curled up like a talon,
and the head was bent down and dented. It looked old
as Rome, and the right size, but Jesus’s
hands would have torn right through, they had nailed him
by his wrists, they didn’t have the chair, yet,
with its scarlet cap, they didn’t have the ovens
for him and his family. I set the gloves
on the daily news, to dry—one lost from one
worker, one lost from another, a left
and a right, the way we are in this together.
What a piece of work is man,
in Albany, and Washington,
in Texas, and in Louisiana, at
Angola, in the Red Hat House.
The night before she went back to college,
she went through my sweater drawer, so when she left she was in
black wool, with maroon creatures
knitted in, an elk branched across her
chest, a lamb on her stomach, a cat,
an ostrich. Eighteen, she was gleaming with a haze
gleam, a shadow of the glisten of her birth
when she had taken off my body—that thick coat, cast
off after a journey. In the elevator
door window, I could see her half-profile—
strong curves of her face, like the harvest
moon, and when she pressed 1,
she set. Hum and creak of her descent,
the backstage cranking of the solar system,
the lighted car sank like a contained
calm world. Eighteen years
I had been a mother! In a way now I was past it—
resting, watching our girl bloom.
And then she was on the train, in her dress
like a zodiac, her body covered with
the animals that carried us in their
bodies for a thousand centuries
of sex and death, until flesh knew itself, and spoke.
After her toxic shock, my mother tried to
climb out of bed in the I.C.U.—half
over the rails, she’d dangle, the wires and
tubes holding her back, I.V.,
oxygen, catheter, blood-pressure cuff,
heart monitor—streaming with strings,
she’d halt, ninety pounds, and then she’d
haul, and the wires and tubes would go taut
and start to rip. So they tied her down,
first her chest in a soft harness,
strapped around the mattress, then her wrists
with long, sterile gauze ribbons,
to the bars of the bed, then, when she kicked until
she raised blue baby-fist welts on her ankles they
put her in five-point. I stood by the bed while she
bucked and tugged, she slowly raised her
head and shoulders like the dead, she called in a
hoarse, cold baritone,
Untie my hands. I sat by the rails,
she was fixed like a constellation to the bed,
and I sang to her, while the Valium
did nothing, not the first shot
or the second, I went through the old carols as she
squirmed and writhed, five-pointed flesh that
gave me life, and when the morphine took her,
I sang her down—Star of wonder,
Star of night.
They tell you it won’t make much sense, at first,
you will have to learn the terrain. They tell you this
at thirty, and fifty, and some are late
beginners, at last lying down and walking
the bright earth of the breasts—the rounded,
cobbled, ploughed field of one,
with a listening walking, and then the other—
fingertip-stepping, divining, north
to south, east to west, sectioning
the low, fallen hills, sweeping
for mines. And the matter feels primordial,
unimaginable—dense,
cystic, phthistic, each breast like the innards
of a cell, its contents shifting and changing,
streambed gravel under walking feet, it
seems almost unpicturable, not
immemorial, but nearly un-
memorizable, but one marches,
slowly, through grave or fatal danger,
or no danger, one feels around in the
two tackroom drawers, ribs and
knots like leather bridles and plaited
harnesses and bits and reins,
one runs one’s hands through the mortal tackle
in a jumble, in the dark, indoors. Outside–
night, in which these glossy ones were
ridden to a froth of starlight, bareback.
When I heard that my mother had stood up after her near
death of toxic shock, at first
I could not get that supine figure in my
mind’s eye to rise, she had been so
flat, her face shiny as the ironing board’s
gray asbestos cover. Once my
father had gone that horizontal, he did
not lift up, again, until he was
fire. But my mother put her fine legs
over the side, got her soles
on the floor, slowly poured her body from the
mattress into the vertical, she
stood between nurse and husband, and they let
go, for a second—alive, upright,
my primate! When I’d last seen her, she was silver
and semi-liquid, like something ladled
onto the sheet, early form
of shimmering life, amoeba or dazzle of
jism, and she’d tried to speak, like matter
trying to speak. Now she stands by the bed,
gaunt, slightly luminous, the
hospital gown hanging in blue
folds, like the picture of Jesus-come-back
in my choir book. She seemed to feel close to Jesus,
she loved the way he did not give up,
nothing could stop his love, he stood there
teetering beside the stone bed and he
folded his grave-clothes.
Whenever I see a chair like it,
I consider it: the no arms,
the lower limbs of pear or cherry.
Sometimes I’ll take hold of the back slat
and lift the four-legged creature off the floor to hear
the joints creak, the wind in the timbers,
hauling of keel rope. And the structure will not
utter, just some music of reed and tether,
Old Testament cradle. Whenever I see
a Hitchcock chair—not a Federal,
or an Eames—I pay close, furniture
attention, even as my mind is taking its
seablind cartwheels back. But if every
time you saw a tree—pear,
cherry, American elm, American
oak, beech, bayou cypress—
your eyes checked for a branch, low enough
but not too low, and strong enough,
and you thought of your uncle, or father, or brother,
third cousin twice removed
murdered on a tree, then you would have
the basis for a working knowledge of American History.
There was a cut clove of garlic, under
a glass tumbler, there were spoons tarnished opal
in a cup, there was a nesting bowl
in a nesting bowl in a nesting bowl
on the sill, when I understood there was a chance they might
have to remove my womb. I bent over,
wanting to cry out, It’s my best friend, it’s like
having a purse of your own, of yourself, it’s like
being where you came from, as if you are your origin,
the basket of life, the withies, the osier
reed weave, where your little best beloveds
lay and took heart, took on the weights
and measures. I love the pear shape,
the upside-downness, the honor of bringing
forth the living so new they can almost
not be said to be dying yet.
And the two who rested, without fear or elation,
against the endometrium,
over the myometrium, held
around by the serosa … In the latter days,
the unclosed top of the precious head pressed
down on the inner os, and down on the
outer os, and the feet played up against
the fundus, and I could feel, in myself—
of myself—the tale of love’s flesh.
Soon enough, the whole small
city of my being will demolish—what if now
one dwelling, the central dwelling,
the holy-seeming dwelling, might go. Like a fiber
suitcase, in a mown field, it stands,
its worn clasps gleaming.