We’ re headed for empty-headedness,
the featureless amnesias of Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada,
states rich only in vowel sounds and alliteration.
We’ re taking the train so we can see into the heart
of the heart of America framed in the windows’ cool
oblongs of light. We want cottages, farmhouses
with peaked roofs leashed by wood smoke to the clouds;
This was the winter mother told time by my heart
ticking like a frayed fan belt in my chest.
This was the fifties & we were living on nothing
& what of her, the black girl, my own black nurse,
what of her who arrived on Greyhound in the heart
of so dramatic a storm it froze the sleeves at her wrists
& each nostril was rimed with white like salt on a glass,
what of her who came up the dark stair on the limp of her
own bad ticker, weary, arrogant, thin, her suitcase noosed
That was not the summer of aspic
and cold veal. It was so hot
the car seat stung my thighs
and the rearview mirror swam
with mirage. In the back seat
the leather grip was noosed by twine.
We were not poor but we had
the troubles of the poor.
She who had been that soft snore
beside the Nytol, open-mouthed,
was gone, somewhere, somewhere
there was a bay, there was a boat,
She always liked to blow the candles out. Fact:
there’ s only so much you can do with friction
and an intentional hand before the hand burns.
The sound that scissors make in a child’ s hand
while crunching construction paper aches when
she grows older. Even popcorn ceilings lose that style,
that feeling of a cereal freshly drowned in milk.
Ah, the white beneath things. And the black below that.
We come down from bunk beds. We come down from
the funky reds and yellows of the spring’ s summer tanager
& sea swell, hiss ofincomprehensible flat: distance: blue long-fingered ocean and its
nothing else: nothing in the above visible except
water: water and
Today I heard a rich and hungry boy verbatim quote
all last night’ s infomercials — an anorectic son
who bought with Daddy’ s Amex black card
the Bowflex machine and Abdomenizer,
plus a steak knife that doth slice
the inner skin of his starving arms.
Poor broken child of Eve myself,
to me, the flightless fly,
the listing, blistered, scalded.
I am the rod to their lightning.
Mine is the earhole their stories pierce.
At my altar the blouse is torn open
and the buttons sailed across
You have a beautiful mouth,
Luigi, the man-boy says.
The rubber raft
has floated far
from shore.
The choice
is this:
medusa sea,
a boil
of jellied lashes,
or
face
the kiss.
You have lived six decades and you have lived none
You have loved many and you have loved no one
You wedded three wives but you lie in your cold bed alone
You sired four children but they cannot forgive you
for my love, Charles (1938-2000)
Say: 言
❖
A hundred red fire ants scouring, scouring the white peony
❖
Fallen plum blossoms return to the branch, you sleep, then
harden again
❖
Cuttlefish in my palm stiffens with rigor mortis, boy toys can't
love
❖
Neighbor's barn: grass mat, crickets, Blue Boy, trowel handle,
dress soaked in mud
❖
Iron-headed mace; double-studded halberd slice into emptiness
❖
