24 WEEKS
Behind this mortal Bone
There knits a bolder One—
—Emily Dickinson
A Pelvis like a Window.
A smeared Window on a Ferry—public—
well mapped. A Woman is for everyone.
A wider Gait was wanted:
I walked with Legs pinched tight.
Like Letter—like Clam—
they’ll steam the Breach amenable.
An aftertaste of Salt:
eider, piqued, utopian
from Worlds before the Cell.
A Pelvis like a Woman is a public
Clam, a Claim, a Pinkerton Letter.
A Voice asks which Arm
to take some Blood. I had forgotten
the inky Arms! Hung with Veins
near surfacing each day. I say left,
the side of Spleen. Then No, I want
the right. Where Aim and Ire coordinate.
An arm is eider Blanket—inner Barbs
within its Planes of Heat
are piquant, are a public Chapeling
in salt white blue and green.
These thickened Veins do church work,
make Fools feel they read
by looking at a Window cut in Faces.
Their Eyes move over Slugs of Lead
from Stain to glassy Stain. An Altar
is a Pelvis is a steaming Window Rose
in mullioned Ink. The frank
Meat-Love of all the fake Elect!
You who read off difference
on my Torso’s swollen Lectern
happy for a Lemma
of innately sexed Design:
I am more You than Bone-grout
locks your Features
to your Skull. I know and be
more You than all the flaking outcries
settled on your Collar,
your windsored Tie. I comb
your peeling Pate my own.
Bilks and Cozeners,
an Othering is ashen is
a malisoned Presume.
I public on your Pelvis.
I grate the Meat of Roses
on our siamese Spleen. For you
are I ensembled woman-
parted—and I everyone
for You. I ire for
this Body—all ours—
a sinking Ferry mullioned
through the Heart—lowering
between saltwild Signs.
AGAINST MATERNITY
I will not live like the chipper clump of October hydrangea.
Empty at the center. Drying all its brown manifolds
in the shipmaster brightness along the shore.
Dunes pile up
against the garden’s granite wall.
Already I feel memory
sapping off my hands.
Dimes on my sockets. A pittance
to let go the glyphs
I used to read by.
Half mummy, half hot jar of heart
I summon a dozen lovers
to assume the grand tableaux.
The fresco silts and then dissolves.
The spider salves its lime.
Who am I if not
vast thirsts—that grasping
at the flexed heel
at the pulse?
Who am I not possessed?
Lathing shapes
undertow my abdomen.
Antimatter world coeval with my own
and stripping through me.
Body thickens but the self
its soleness thins.
A watery heel rises to my belly.
Kerning of stacked and ravenous limbs
hum blank the way the sirens did.
Make me wonder what you are.
Make me mad and questing like the men
of old story. Do not keep me
home. Me for sating
whatever need, me adaptable,
me a stock pot for feeding-from,
me home, me numb?
Will it be like silk
on glass—the contrasts
slipping past each other
not knowing how to bite,
to catch—tense past whisked off
snagless?
Will it be like a stroke—a block of blank
where tiller was, the eyeball
spared but groundless, out
of harness—my soft selfish
and lexical core
sleeping under bracken?
Do not hollow me
Attic and Parthian world.
World of marble and iodine—world with shell
and lapis inlay
flaking from the eyes.
If it had been acceptable
only to move and graze
only to be a thing
you would have taught it.
I would have learned.
Small yellow leaves
press against black asphalt.
Its warmth in the sun
makes them go soft.
They can flatten and settle on the dark.
World that gave me learning and clangor—
Do not make me too grateful. Do not make me too simple.
FILM MAUDIT
When the baby is asleep I leave
Home a few seconds take
The dog and pace the edifice.
Her burning gold ellipses excuse mine
All over the plants. You at the movies watch
A city, a season, a shadow hand
Its keys to anyone who wants to live
With a picture: Here, would you like
To join us in Paris?
To enter unannounced? You are our boyfriend
Now. We love you—we the lead
And all the extras. Life is very bright
Screened before you. An X-ray all bone
Unbroken, airless, splitless, a Shirley
Temple umbrella bigger, more important than
Drink itself, which is sweet and in this schema
Cups life’s fundament, the molecules we call
Wet when polar charge holds them just
A little, not too much, a cuddle with a cutoff
Granting spillage and expanse. The rustle—
Pacified phone somewhere, beer clicking inside
Purse a row behind you—is the music
Of the dangle of those keys to life afloat
Above your grasp. Their brass teeth form
The plumage flashed in that long mating
Dance with doors. The two kinds
Of movies and marriage are hinges
And hasps. And you are in a double
Feature—your neighbor shakes
A popcorn bag, Anna Karina tosses
Her hair, everything twinkling and rattling
Those exit keys again. . . . You could have closed
Your palm around their cool. Unlocked
A celluloid self gullivered with just
Your face, but out of this world’s zip
Ties and stake-downs, the cobwebby ropelets,
Any one trivial—but so many! and together salient
As picnic ants—this other you now sails
On swift to his next world and time.
The two kinds of movies and marriages are:
The outbound and the inbound—
whether, steering ship,
On your right is starboard or
The port—the hero coming home, convening—
Whether there is a port to speak of.
My kind of line is to be sequined
Here, a simple stitch, lilliputian
But cumulative, a mermaid mail
That makes all the little saucers shine
Just by holding on to some kind
Of backcloth while the torso
Moves in the light. Sequins: that’s my kind
Of motion: fixed and also beam-shook,
Tilt-mad, tailored on the bias, and photographs
Well. Here I stay, but feral yet. Anchored
But crazed, tied at the mast without my cotton.
Your kind might be something more
Shorn, less shine, more free.
Not that you would do anything
But stay. This marks the difference, though—
Your goodwill and its long and notional leash—
My needle through the eye
Of the sequin of me. My shining
With adherence. There are how many
Kinds of necessity, and how do we know
We attach to what we love exactly right?
Dog and I are done with burning out
A track for ourselves between the trees
And further go into the nylon-dark block
Feeling it pill where overtouched.
We’ll go back to the baby in a moment in
His crib in the tightest tailoring
He will ever know, smother proof, the low
Couture of need sewn onto need—
But it looks good in the projector
Room I carry in a velvet
Jewel box in my skull.
It looks like we are all safe and here, breathing.
Here on the block it’s the live world still.
A man rolls by with a red wire cart
Full of cans to loosen the deposits from
The state into his palm. The night’s
A good time to collect. A nickel apiece.
A stepped-on one’s a ringer
For a shining cervix,
Its tabbed mouth leaking
Tart sugar water or grain
Gone off. Or saucer of a lens cap,
Keeping looking safe, keeping the moving
Picture-maker uncracked even
In the listing roll of every shot scene of
Every voyage out and back.
TEACHING SPEECH
Saying yes to no and yes to yes to
the baby boy so many times a day
it’s like a people’s protest chant gone non-
electric harboring a claim belonged
to everyone who cares, we care, we crawl
outside and spy more life to point and yes
at with a name. What do you call the fence
around a tree? Who is the life you seek
when indexing the noon moon’s matte navel,
gray and nervous, and tell her wait for night?
To mother is a power ever to be
repeating, peat-cut to provide a weight
of burnable goods by eons replaced,
a turf, a moniker, another yes.
FIRST CUT
twenty months old
did I make that
(him) or what if I hadn’t been
before
the maker but now capable was
making it stick? maybe very
stuck, had been, he, pro tem
a life refulging
too changing every
day to speak of it (didn’t)
and I cut his hair today like
slicing
an orange or netting
a Christmas tree did I
reckon the resin
of a ringed feeling
stacked on
my fingers
in this grave kisslike experience
how did I pile him
aside from himself
strange before bed
as he slept, after, did I yes
samples in envelopes
I will send those chestnuts to the moon!
would hang
these Victorianas secular novenas
tralalas
for cable news
(and to his grandmothers don’t
have the same sweet
teeth for locks
but mail has many converts, see
Titus, Romans, Timothy
)
WRITING AND NURSING
I began to see writing and nursing as one
looped process whereby expressing caused the body
to widen and deepen its reserves, to beef up to
the point of pain—the point of ugliness—
small marbles under the skin like tumors
or ladybugs, dots upon dots, parasites
begging to be pushed out to the world’s
relief through stress of one other person wanting
what was inside, the white jet—or even
without that person, the stream
could continue months or years with the right
machine, something that mimics a baby
and the hard chain-link shape of the baby mouth,
something that pulls fast first then lazy
but stronger, like what Marcella Hazan said
of Italian cooking and Madhur Jaffrey of Indian,
that you start with a cruel and “lively heat”
under the tomatoes to bring them
to heel but very briefly then simmer
in butter for ages with almost no force. Hungry,
now, writing this, I know that hunger
is countersigned by my breasts—imagine
a nipple dipped in ink, a contract
where the enemy of my enemy is
one theory of movement
of a blotted politics—this appetite squashes
what it needs to, blackens and redacts
thought and project to make more milk,
to make more fat in me so the milk
can be rich later, even if I stopped
everything—eating, pleasure, even
if a lively heat held off crops—in the short term
fat milk would stammer on.
The soffritto—first step of many national
cuisines, from sub + frying, not suffering,
though my ear is tin and prying
the peels apart, prefix from root, harder
than crushing garlic or grammar skin
and all—that’s the term for higher heat
untampered by water or excess juice.
Now you’re really cooking, when you
can resist the urge toward an ending and enter
the components one by one, often
from driest to finally the kinds of leaves that carry
in stiff stalks their own power to cloud,
to make it rain inside a lidded dish—
but what exactly hurts
is the “letdown,” sometimes, midwife-speak
for milk when first released after curling
in its bulbs and trails inside
the breast deciding the tension is
unbearable so there must—the breast
with its slow, generic thoughts thinks—be
a creature outside, there must
be guest, there must, come out!, be someone
to feed to explain why I feel so. A bit
like the start of a “writing day,” some idiot’s term,
what to call it when the business is only
to be pumped, to express, and after get yourself
straight, cordoned, pared and cored—but early
on you will lack even these labors because
one must first ooze out a thick expression
of letters, balled up suspended
particles like fat in milk.
Milk has ruled me as writing
has ruled me, in squat shudders
of pain with no proportion
to output, which can for all the buildup be a pinched
crude approximation of real storms like the shot blue dribbles
of wiper fluid from a car—the way forward
screened by colloids of upflung organics
on glass, gray porridge of dead arthropods
(from “jointed feet,” like a poem) that nobody loved
but persist far longer than their brief lives
across the miles and the shield—just so the milk
that I express is sometimes more
and sometimes less than what I would have guessed
from bare hazard. I am hot, sub-frying
in my house robe and a greasy chore—<
the milk, the line—becomes more massy
and opaque each minute I think
about it, more than weather-haze,
than cumulonimbus or the tempered pane
of glass, the shield within which all drive,
the miles from home, the writing
and the nursing forming rather a person
out of nearly-nothing, out of bone leach and election
to pull and be pulled, allowing this
to happen to the body and the brain,
the milk and the line advancing, creeping, longer than<
the first straits ever cut a defile in the land and long
past when the backflown slurry of
the earth must go on righting it.
AMERICAN MERCHANTS, LET’S TRADE OUR PROTECTIONS
and I’ll give you how I couldn’t stand my sweetheart
hieing without me to some snug cubby of a bar
where I know how a tea candle makes all beauties
shimmer under their reprobate shirts, and you’ll
give me how your porcelain forehead smears cold<
when you think the cleaning lady’s doing the math,
and I’ll give you my violaceous bile when I read poets
better than me, and you’ll market me a drink for that,
and you’ll give me your torpor under the seedless trees,
and I’ll give you that I sometimes wake
literally counting money, pondering which figment
to buy in the stricken aisles my brain remade in dreams,
and you’ll confirm the order, and you’ll enclose me
in a barrier bouquet, and I’ll enclose you in a once-common
form of hug, it’s record weather, come dance, the needle’s
hidden in the black parting of songs on their vinyl wafer,
it’s hot, it’s November, we’re nobody perfect
and I hold envy, pride, and lust in my teeth
like hydroponic roses that gasoline here
over scores of borders, and you, what are you holding
in your tanned portfolio, it’s a wheat pit out there
and I can’t stand the sweat wedged between
our trading fingers, I’m a lover
not a lighter, not with the fires of the earth, I do
not want you driven from home like a future
Pompeii cast curled in dust around
some bejeweled pendant, I merely feel the rain
that is water to this day though you might
recant it when it fails some private standard
for yourselves, rain spattering the homeless children
selling useless chocolate by the bus stop,
decant that, see what industry, mark the rain
darkening the gray curbstone running along
every perforated checkbook, and when the roads
steam open like a captured letter
I will remember I too ran my small theater of desires
and misconceptions, I worsened a few lives and peddled
entry to those stiff diegetic squeaking seats,
but never have I stolen much more than I had to,
or if I had, I never styled my takings as prizes
for my glory and my cute smile, or if I had,
I never meant not to write some grand correction
to some editor’s belated cherry desk, and you,
have you also some binder of muggings you’d like
to unclip and weep over, have you a chessboard
you’ve stripped the moves from and bound
together at its corners until it’s more of
a purulent soccer ball, have your gifts to the future
been downy and nurseless and brittle boned
choking in their severed ribbons, have you
the recollection of doling a managed pain
in sprinkle-sized perfections of clattering chalk,
have you more of these economies, have you
grown them, those faces on the cookie-fueled banners,
I’ll give you a creaking shelter, it was mine from end to end,
it was mine and I bordered it and I called it goods.
