Poetry 365

It’s done; I planned, did it deliberately,
and wormed a place in you with some dull lies.
And now, does a hurt anger in your eyes
whip back? I’ll slash the cords you lash to me.

Cast off. Wakes mingled. O sweet piracy—
flesh grappling below rafters, cries…All cries
stop when rising depths choke your replies.
And then blank surface and white debris.

And so it’s over. Nothing…then the night.
We sit. I sense you lost somewhere below.
Depths of you move, fingering me with fright,

and the night whirls, goes empty, and I’m wound
down to you, weightless, crushed….O, when I flow
into you, fear comes, both of us are drowned.

Such time as I’d drop by
you’d lead me to the den
straight past your parents, who’d
pointedly sit there glued
to talk shows, CNN,
the volume turned up high.

So what if dystrophy
shriveled your tits and clit
as long as you’d crouch, eyes
famished, between my thighs;
I treated you like shit,
your only hold on me

exerted on my twists
and turnings in the chair;
then as I’d start to come
your rage at being numb
pinned me exploding there,
gripped as with cuffs on the wrists.

The day my girl is lost for an hour,
the day I think she is gone forever and then I find her,
I sit with her a while and then I
go to the corner store for orange juice for her
lips, tongue, palate, throat,
stomach, blood, every gold cell of her body.
I joke around with the guy behind the counter, I
walk out into the winter air and
weep. I know he would never hurt her,
would never take her body in his hands to
crack it or crush it, would keep her safe and
bring her home to me. Yet there are
those who would. I pass the huge
cockeyed buildings, massive as prisons,
charged, loaded, cocked with people,
some who would love to take my girl, to un-
do her, fine strand by fine
strand. These are buildings full of rope,
ironing boards, sash, wire,
iron cords wove in black-and-blue spirals like
umbilici, apartments supplied with
razor blades and lye. This is my
quest, to know where it is, the evil in the
human heart. As I walk home I
look in face after face for it, I
see the dark beauty, the rage, the
grown-up children of the city she walks as a
child, a raw target. I cannot
see a soul who would do it. I clutch the
jar of juice like a cold heart,
remembering the time my parents tied me to a chair and
would not feed me and I looked up
into their beautiful faces, my stomach a
bright mace, my wrists like birds the
shrike has hung up by the throat from barbed wire, I
gazed as deep as I could into their eyes
and all I saw was goodness, I could not get past it.
I rush home with the blood of oranges
pressed to my breast, I cannot get it to her fast enough.

here is another bone to pick with you
o mother whose bones i worry for scraps,
nobody warned me about daughters;
how they bewitch you into believing
you have thrown off a pot that is yourself
then one night you creep into their rooms and
their faces have hardened into odd flowers
their voices are choosing in foreign elections and
their legs are open to strange unwieldy men.

Each gesture
is a common one, a
black dog, crying, a
man, crying.

All alike, people
or things grow
fixed with what
happens to them.

I throw a stone.
It hits the wall,
it hits a dog,
it hits a child—

my sentimental
names for years
and years ago, from
something I’ve not become.

If I look
in the mirror,
the wall, I
see myself.

If I try
to do better
and better, I
do the same thing.

Let me hit you.
Will it hurt.
Your face is hurt
all the same.

She looked nearly the same
But when I hugged her
There was substantially more
To her—no doubt as with me.
She fibbed as I did at the edge
Of curb under the streetlight
As spiders dropped like tiny
Parachutes—they were difficult
To see. On the periphery
Of good luck, I though,
Revisiting her quirky habits
And expressions, what I eventually
Found so bothersome. Except
When I glanced at my watch
I discovered I was trembling
Like a small-time embezzler.
I see, she said, you must have
An appointment. The driveways
And hedges funneling back
Into darkness, into someone else’s
Childhood, where speech was
And obstacle. Wild turkeys
Approaching across the lawn.
Oh no, I said, I’m just so pleased
To see you. But that didn’t
Make sense either. She cocked
Her head, a woman with grown
Twins and three conniving husbands.
Even my toes felt damp. I remember,
She said, when you’d lay your head
On my lap, I’d stroke your hair—
I didn’t recall. Though I thought
That would be an good idea now.
But I’m married, I said. I own
My own business. It would have
Been helpful if I’d planned
Some banter. I’m a high school
Principal, she told me,
I don’t put up with horseshit
From anyone. I brushed the arm
Of her jacket—she merely stared.
A door slammed. A grown idiot
Drooled in an attic somewhere down
The lane. I had another image
As well, one that held an odor
Of patchouli oil. As she stepped
Forward without caution, placed an hand
On my neck. Take me, she insisted,
To those rivets of flame following
Wire—because this is it,
You’ll never have another
Hour. I immediately felt
Calmer…

Such conundrums
of English. I blame
my ex-wife. She
rearranged my
dictionary, or re-
taught an old story:
in this book,
if you look
for alimony,
it follows
acrimony (nothing
between). However,
contrition still
borders contrivance
(if it can be seen).
Untruth in her
troth sallowed
the language, sullied
a certain conjugation:
how she lied
as she lay with me.
Apparently her
monogamy was too
close to monotony.

Alas, after parting
with that particular
lass, I remain
a student
examining all
our words’
graduation:
how anniversary
now precedes
annihilation.

It seemed like suffering, or a lesser form of anguish,
though I’m not sure where it comes from,
watching the possum choose an eggshell
from the garbage can, there in the night orchard
of this minor city, the streetlight’s hum so peculiar,
clumsy nest bright above the alley. I knew right then
the earth loved it more than me. A city possum,
no “o,” no rat, two babies asleep on its back
and a hunger shot through with fear, with purpose.
In the awkwardness of its living, I feared the city
would abandon me. The possum, too.
I had grown accustomed to its visits.
It lived under the abandoned house down the street,
where the prostitute’s body was found last winter,
where the walls grow gentle with rot, a gentleness
gone wrong, harm and permanence, whole and flaw.
Everything is sacrificed to something. The fill the spaces,
I guess. Ash in the trees, then the two stars come out,
the only ones the city allows, little-blue-star-pale-in-its-cups,
little-junkie-trackmarks-thanks-for-nothing.
The city has two mouths, the river and the sky,
both brown in the darkness, and open.
More than likely, there is a place inside the body
that is not afraid, but I haven’t found it yet,
there is not returning. The hills bear down.
The possum is not jealous, mores slow
through the walls. We can lie down in our emptiness.

I want to take the word back into my body, back
from the northern restaurants with their neon signs
announcing it like a whore. I want it to be private again,
I want to sink back into the swamps that are nothing
like these clean restaurants, the swamps
with their mud and jaws and eyes that float
below the surface, the mud and jaws and eyes
of flood or death. I want to see my father’s father’s
hands again, scarred with a life of netting and trapping,
thick gunk of bayou under his fingernails,
staining his cuticles, I want to remember the pride he took
gutting and cleaning what he caught; his were nothing
like the soft hands and clipped fingernails that serve us
in these restaurants cemented in land, the restaurants nothing
like the house we lived in and died in, anchored in water,
trembling with every wing and flood.

And what my father’s mother knew:
how to make alligator tail sweet, how to cut up
muscled squirrel or rabbit, or wild duck,
cook it till it was tender, spice it and mix it all up
with rice that soaked up the spice and the game so that
it all filled your mouth, thick and sticky, tasting
like blood and cayenne. And when I see the signs
on the restaurants, Cajun food served here,
it’s like a fish knife ripping my belly, and when I see
them all eating white meat of fat chickens
and market cuts of steak or fish someone else
has caught and cooked cajun style, I feel it
again, the word’s been stolen, like me,
gutted.

Find me afterward in the rain,
naked. I have tears in my eyes,
bruises on my face and hands;
I dreamt my way out of childhood
again, and still did not win.

No walk in a summer storm
will wash the smell of him away.
No nightmare will absolve me
from this likeness in the mirror.
His skin, freckled and pale,

is my skin, now that I am forty,
approaching the age he was
when he first touched me
and did not smile, but moaned.

He comes into the room at night
to sleep in my body, heavy
in the bed, thick with liquor,
the taste of cigarettes in his mouth.

A razor of light from the doorway
cuts across my tangles sheets.
The house is bloody with silence.