The Dead and the Living Read online

  the bulb hidden in the dark soil,

  stuck, impacted, sure of its rightful place.

  My Father Snoring

  Deep in the night, I would hear it through the wall—

  my father snoring, the great, dark

  clotted mucus rising in his nose and

  falling, like coils of seaweed a wave

  brings in and takes back. The clogged roar

  filled the house. Even down in the kitchen,

  in the drawers, the knives and forks hummed with that

  distant throbbing. But in my room

  next to theirs, it was so loud

  I could feel myself inside his body,

  lifted on the knotted rope of his life

  and lowered again, into the narrow

  dark well, its amber walls

  slick around my torso, the smell of bourbon

  rich as sputum. He lay like a felled

  beast all night and sounded his thick

  buried stoppered call, like a cry for

  help. And no one ever came:

  there were none of his kind around there anywhere.

  The Moment

  When I saw the dark Egyptian stain,

  I went down into the house to find you, Mother—

  past the grandfather clock, with its huge

  ochre moon, past the burnt

  sienna woodwork, rubbed and glazed.

  I went deeper and deeper down into the

  body of the house, down below the

  level of the earth. It must have been

  the maid’s day off, for I found you there

  where I had never found you, by the wash tubs,

  your hands thrust deep in soapy water,

  and above your head, the blazing windows

  at the surface of the ground.

  You looked up from the iron sink,

  a small haggard pretty woman

  of 40, one week divorced.

  “I’ve got my period, Mom,” I said,

  and saw your face abruptly break open and

  glow with joy. “Baby,” you said,

  coming toward me, hands out and

  covered with tiny delicate bubbles like seeds.

  My Father’s Breasts

  Their soft surface, the polished silk of the hair

  running down them delicately like

  water. I placed my cheek—once,

  perhaps—upon their firm shape,

  my ear pressed against the black

  charge of the heart within. At most

  once—yet when I think of my father

  I think of his breasts, my head resting

  on his fragrant chest, as if I had spent

  hours, years, in that smell of black pepper and

  turned earth.

  The Takers

  Hitler entered Paris the way my

  sister entered my room at night,

  sat astride me, squeezed me with her knees,

  held her thumbnails to the skin of my wrists and

  peed on me, knowing Mother would

  never believe my story. It was very

  silent, her dim face above me

  gleaming in the shadows, the dark gold

  smell of her urine spreading through the room, its

  heat boiling on my legs, my small

  pelvis wet. When the hissing stopped, when the

  hole had been scorched in my body, I lay

  crisp and charred with shame and felt her

  skin glitter in the air, her dark

  gold pleasure unfold as he stood over

  Napoleon’s tomb and murmured This is the

  finest moment of my life.

  The Pact

  We played dolls in that house where Father staggered with the

  Thanksgiving knife, where Mother wept at

  noon into her one ounce of

  cottage cheese, praying for the strength not to

  kill herself. We kneeled over the

  rubber bodies, gave them baths

  carefully, scrubbed their little

  orange hands, wrapped them up tight,

  said goodnight, never spoke of the

  woman like a gaping wound

  weeping on the stairs, the man like a stuck

  buffalo, baffled, stunned, dragging

  arrows in his hide. As if we had made a

  pact of silence and safety, we kneeled and

  dressed those tiny torsos with their elegant

  belly-buttons and minuscule holes

  high on the buttock to pee through, and all that

  darkness in their open mouths, so that I

  have not been able to forgive you for giving your

  daughter away, letting her go at

  eight as if you took Molly Ann or

  Tiny Tears and held her head

  under the water in the bathinette

  until no bubbles rose, or threw her

  dark rosy body on the fire that

  burned in that house where you and I

  barely survived, sister, where we

  swore to be protectors.

  The Derelict

  He passes me on the street, his hair

  matted, skin polished with grime,

  muttering, suit stained and stiffened—

  and yet he is so young, his blond beard like a

  sign of beauty and power. But his hands,

  strangely flat, as if nerveless, hang and

  flap slightly as he walks, like hands of

  someone who has had polio, hands

  that cannot be used. I smell the waste of his

  piss, I see the ingot of his beard,

  and think of my younger brother, his beauty,

  coinage and voltage of his beard, his life

  he is not using, like a violinist whose

  hands have been crushed so he cannot play—

  I who was there at the crushing of his hands

  and helped to crush them.

  Late Speech with My Brother

  I can see you now so vividly,

  fine head tilted back,

  bold Teutonic jaw stiff, the

  bristle along it glistens and your blue

  eyes glitter like glass. I have always

  feared you would take your life, I have seen you

  taking your life for thirty-five years,

  taking it cell by cell. I can see you

  throw away your body as easily

  as you thrust your whole thumb that time

  into the moving machinery, so

  gracefully, as if you understood

  the union of science and the human. I can see you

  sending your body to hell as they sent us to

  bed without supper, you’re as big as them now

  and as proud, you would die before you would break and say

  Please, don’t. Please, don’t

  do their work for them,

  don’t produce a stopped life like some

  work of art, the bottle fallen

  away from your open hand. It is not

  too late, your life is ahead of you,

  behind you is your thirty-five years of

  death—I have seen a man of eighty

  drop his parents’ hands and just walk the other way.

  The Elder Sister

  When I look at my elder sister now

  I think how she had to go first, down through the

  birth canal, to force her way

  head-first through the tiny channel,

  the pressure of Mother’s muscles on her brain,

  the tight walls scraping her skin.

  Her face is still narrow from it, the long

  hollow cheeks of a Crusader on a tomb,

  and her inky eyes have the look of someone who has

  been in prison a long time and

  knows they can send her back. I look at her

  body and think how her breasts were the first to

  rise, slowly, like swa
ns on a pond.

  By the time mine came along, they were just

  two more birds in the flock, and when the hair

  rose on the white mound of her flesh, like

  threads of water out of the ground, it was the

  first time, but when mine came

  they knew about it. I used to think

  only in terms of her harshness, sitting and

  pissing on me in bed, but now I

  see I had her before me always

  like a shield. I look at her wrinkles, her clenched

  jaws, her frown-lines—I see they are

  the dents on my shield, the blows that did not reach me.

  She protected me, not as a mother

  protects a child, with love, but as a

  hostage protects the one who makes her

  escape as I made my escape, with my sister’s

  body held in front of me.

  II. The Men

  The Connoisseuse of Slugs

  When I was a connoisseuse of slugs

  I would part the ivy leaves, and look for the

  naked jelly of those gold bodies,

  translucent strangers glistening along the

  stones, slowly, their gelatinous bodies

  at my mercy. Made mostly of water, they would shrivel

  to nothing if they were sprinkled with salt,

  but I was not interested in that. What I liked

  was to draw aside the ivy, breathe the

  odor of the wall, and stand there in silence

  until the slug forgot I was there

  and sent its antennae up out of its

  head, the glimmering umber horns

  rising like telescopes, until finally the

  sensitive knobs would pop out the ends,

  delicate and intimate. Years later,

  when I first saw a naked man,

  I gasped with pleasure to see that quiet

  mystery reenacted, the slow

  elegant being coming out of hiding and

  gleaming in the dark air, eager and so

  trusting you could weep.

  Poem to My First Lover

  Now that I understand, I like to

  think of your terror—handed a girl

  mad with love, her long, fresh

  raw body thin as a pared

  soap, breasts round and high and

  opalescent as bubbles of soap,

  laid across your legs, 18,

  untouched. I like to understand your

  terror, now, the way you took her,

  deflowering her as you’d gut a fish,

  leaving in the morning with talk of a wife.

  Now that I

  know about the fear of love

  I like to think of her white-hot body

  greenish as a fish just landed, quivering and

  slapping on a rock—fallen into your

  lap, man, shuddering like your cock,

  a woman crazed with love, hot off the

  press, sharp as a tool never used,

  blazing across your thighs and all you could

  do in your fear was firk out her cherry like an

  escargot from its dark shell and then

  toss her away. I am in awe of terror that will

  waste so much, I am in love with the girl who went

  offering, came to you and

  laid it out like a feast on a platter, the

  delicate flesh—yes, yes,

  I accept the gift.

  New Mother

  A week after our child was born,

  you cornered me in the spare room

  and we sank down on the bed.

  You kissed me and kissed me, my milk undid its

  burning slip-knot through my nipples,

  soaking my shirt. All week I had smelled of milk,

  fresh milk, sour. I began to throb:

  my sex had been torn easily as cloth by the

  crown of her head, I’d been cut with a knife and

  sewn, the stitches pulling at my skin—

  and the first time you’re broken, you don’t know

  you’ll be healed again, better than before.

  I lay in fear and blood and milk

  while you kissed and kissed me, your lips hot and swollen

  as a teen-age boy’s, your sex dry and big,

  all of you so tender, you hung over me,

  over the nest of the stitches, over the

  splitting and tearing, with the patience of someone who

  finds a wounded animal in the woods

  and stays with it, not leaving its side

  until it is whole, until it can run again.

  The Line

  When we understood it might be cancer,

  I lay down beside you in the night,

  my palm resting in the groove of your chest,

  the rachis of a leaf. There was no question of

  making love: deep inside my body that

  small hard lump. In the half-light

  of my half-life, my hand in the beautiful

  sharp cleft of your chest, the valley of the

  shadow of death,

  there was only the present moment, and as you

  slept in the quiet, I watched you as one watches

  a newborn child, aware each moment of the

  miracle, the line that has been crossed

  out of the darkness.

  The Fear of Oneself

  As we get near the house, taking off our gloves,

  the air forming a fine casing of

  ice around each hand,

  you say you believe I would hold up under torture

  for the sake of our children. You say you think I have

  courage. I lean against the door and weep,

  the tears freezing on my cheeks with brittle

  clicking sounds.

  I think of the women standing naked

  on the frozen river, the guards pouring

  buckets of water over their bodies till they

  glisten like trees in an ice storm.

  I have never thought I could take it, not even

  for the children. It is all I have wanted to do,

  to stand between them and pain. But I come from a

  long line

  of women

  who put themselves

  first. I lean against the huge carved

  cold door, my face glittering with

  glare ice like a dangerous road,

  and think about hot pokers, and goads,

  and the skin of my children, the delicate, tight,

  thin top layer of it

  covering their whole bodies, softly

  glimmering.

  Poem to My Husband from

  My Father’s Daughter

  I have always admired your courage. As I see you

  embracing me, in the mirror, I see I am

  my father as a woman, I see you bravely

  embrace him in me, putting your life in his

  hands as mine. You know who I am—you can

  see his hair springing from my head like

  oil from the ground, you can see his eyes,

  reddish as liquor left in a shot-glass and

  dried dark, looking out of my face,

  and his firm sucking lips, and the breasts

  rising frail as blisters from his chest,

  tipped with apple-pink. You are fearless, you

  enter him as a woman, my sex like a

  wound in his body, you flood your seed in his

  life as me, you entrust your children to that

  man as a mother, his hands as my hands

  cupped around their tiny heads. I have never

  known a man with your courage, coming

  naked into the cage with the lion, I

  lay my enormous paws on your scalp I

  take my great tongue and begin to

  run the rasp delicately

  along your skin, humming: as you enter
/>   ecstasy, the hairs lifting

  all over your body, I have never seen a

  happier man.

  Sex Without Love

  How do they do it, the ones who make love

  without love? Beautiful as dancers,

  gliding over each other like ice-skaters

  over the ice, fingers hooked

  inside each other’s bodies, faces

  red as steak, wine, wet as the

  children at birth whose mothers are going to

  give them away. How do they come to the

  come to the come to the God come to the

  still waters, and not love

  the one who came there with them, light

  rising slowly as steam off their joined

  skin? These are the true religious,

  the purists, the pros, the ones who will not

  accept a false Messiah, love the

  priest instead of the God. They do not

  mistake the lover for their own pleasure,

  they are like great runners: they know they are alone

  with the road surface, the cold, the wind,

  the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardiovascular

  health—just factors, like the partner

  in the bed, and not the truth, which is the

  single body alone in the universe

  against its own best time.

  Ecstasy

  As we made love for the third day,

  cloudy and dark, as we did not stop

  but went into it and into it and

  did not hesitate and did not hold back we

  rose through the air, until we were up above

  timber line. The lake lay

  icy and silver, the surface shirred,

  reflecting nothing. The black rocks

  lifted around it into the grainy

  sepia air, the patches of snow

  brilliant white, and even though we

  did not know where we were, we could not

  speak the language, we could hardly see, we

  did not stop, rising with the black

  rocks to the black hills, the black

  mountains rising from the hills. Resting

  on the crest of the mountains, one huge

  cloud with scalloped edges of blazing