One Secret Thing Read online

  clothed, her face lit up with sarcastic

  wonder, and combat. I did not speak, she came

  toward me, I bolted, threw open her door,

  slamming my brother to the floor with a keyhole

  shiner, I poured down the staircase and through

  some rooms, and got my back against

  a wall, I would hurt her before the last scene

  of this long-running act could be played out

  to its completion. When she got there, maybe she could see that,

  we faced off, dressed in our dresses and our

  secret straps and pulleys, and then

  I walked away—and for the year I remained

  in that house, each month our bodies called

  to each other, brought each other bleeding off in the

  waste of the power of creation.

  Home Theater, 1955

  They weren’t armadillos, or sow bugs,

  or nautili, the animals printed on the

  seersucker cotton of my nightie, maybe they were

  rabbits, or deer. There was a new style,

  that year, the shortie nightie, no longer

  than the hem of its matching panties—and on its

  cloth no eels, no trilobites,

  no oviraptors, but goldfish and pigs

  placed in rows like sown seeds.

  That night, what was supposed to be

  inside our father’s head—the arterial

  red—had emerged and cooled on his brow,

  cheeks, mouth, into a Comus mask,

  and the police were there, and our mother was not. It was

  like a Greek play, in a stone

  amphitheater, with very few characters—

  first the one in blood disguise,

  then the elder daughter who

  had called the two officers

  to our home—they were not much older than she, they were

  dressed for the hour in midnight blue.

  And my sister’s torso, in its shortie, in the kitchen,

  seemed to be almost rippling,

  swaying like an upright snake still

  half in its basket. Then, for an instant,

  I thought I saw the younger cop just

  glance at my legs and away, once

  and away, and for a second, the little

  critters on my nightie seemed to me to be

  romping as if in an advertisement.

  Soon after our father had struck himself down,

  there had risen up these bachelors

  beside the sink and stove, and the tiny

  mastodons, and bison, and elk, the

  beasts on my front and back, began,

  atonal, as if around an early fire, to chant.

  Paterfamilias

  In the evenings, during the cocktail hour,

  my mother’s new husband would sometimes inspect

  the troops. Your mother has the best damn fanny

  in the house, he would say to my sister and me—in our

  teens, then twenties, thirties, forties. Turn

  around! he’d cry out, Turn around! We wouldn’t

  turn around, and he’d say, Your mother has the nicest little

  ass in the house. And let’s look at those legs,

  he’d shout, and she’d flash her gams. Your mother

  has the only decent legs in the house,

  he’d growl. And when I’d pass him next,

  he’d bear-hug me, as if to say

  No hard feelings, and hit me hard

  on the rear, and laugh very loud, and his eyes seemed to

  shine as I otherwise never saw them shine,

  like eyes of devils and fascists in horror

  comic books. Then he’d freshen his Scotch, and just

  top hers up, a little, and then

  he’d show us his backwards-curled, decurved

  Hohenzollern thumb—Go on,

  touch it! Touch it! They were people who almost

  did not know any better, who, once

  they found each other, were happy, and felt,

  for the first time, as if they belonged

  on earth—maybe owned it, and every creature on it.

  Easter 1960

  The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on his

  first rotation in the emergency room.

  On the ancient boarding-school radio,

  in the attic hall, the announcer had given my

  boyfriend’s name as one of two

  brought to the hospital after the sunrise

  service, the egg-hunt, the crash—one of them

  critical, one of them dead. I was looking at the

  stairwell banisters, at their lathing,

  the necks and knobs like joints and bones,

  the varnish here thicker here thinner—I had said

  Which one of them died, and now the world was

  an ant’s world: the huge crumb of each

  second thrown, somehow, up onto

  my back, and the young, tired voice

  said my fresh love’s name. It would have been

  nice to tear out the balusters, and rail, and the

  stairs, like a big backbone out of a

  brontosaur, to take some action,

  to do, and do, and do, as a done-to, and

  dear one to a done-to-death-to, to have run, on a

  treadmill, all night, to light the dorm,

  the entire school, with my hate of fate,

  and blow its wiring, and the town’s wiring,

  pull the wires of Massachusetts

  out of the switchboard of the country. I went back to my

  room, I did not know how to get

  out of the world, or how to stay—

  I sat on the floor with the Sunday Times

  and read the columns of the first page down,

  and then the next, and then the next.

  I can still see how every a,

  initiator of his given name,

  looked eager—it hadn’t heard, yet, that its

  boy was gone—and every f

  hung down its head on its broken neck,

  its little arms held out, as if to

  say, You see me, this is what I am.

  PART THREE: Umbilicus

  Umbilicus

  When she was first in the air, upside down,

  it linked us, the stem on which she had blossomed.

  And they tied a knot in it, finishing

  the work of her making. The limp remnant—

  vein, and arteries, and Jelly of Wharton—had

  lived as it would shrivel, by its own laws,

  in a week it would wither away, while the normal

  fetal holes in her heart closed,

  the foramen ovale shutting the passage

  the placental blood had swept, when her lungs,

  flat in their dog-eared wet, had slept.

  I was in shock, my life as I had known it

  over. When they sent us home, they said

  to bathe the stump in alcohol

  twice a day. I was stone afraid,

  and yet she was so interesting—

  moist, doubled-up, wondering, undersea

  being. And the death-nose at the belly-center wizened

  and pizzled and ginsenged and wicked-witch’d until

  the morning I undid her pajamas, and there, in the

  night’s cereus petals, lay her stamen,

  in its place on her the folded tent,

  imbliu, nabhila, nafli, at last

  purely hers, toward the womb an eye now

  sightless, now safe in moated memory.

  When Our Firstborn Slept In

  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

  longe
r 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.

  Toth Farry

  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.

  Home Ec

  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.

  The Space Heater

  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.

  Barbarous Artifacts

  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.
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  What a piece of work is man,

  in Albany, and Washington,

  in Texas, and in Louisiana, at

  Angola, in the Red Hat House.

  Animal Dress

  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.

  Royal Beauty Bright

  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,