One Secret Thing Read online

  and I sang to her, while the Valium

  did nothing, not the first shot

  or the second, I went through the old carols as she

  squirmed and writhed, five-pointed flesh that

  gave me life, and when the morphine took her,

  I sang her down—Star of wonder,

  Star of night.

  Self-Exam

  They tell you it won’t make much sense, at first,

  you will have to learn the terrain. They tell you this

  at thirty, and fifty, and some are late

  beginners, at last lying down and walking

  the bright earth of the breasts—the rounded,

  cobbled, ploughed field of one,

  with a listening walking, and then the other—

  fingertip-stepping, divining, north

  to south, east to west, sectioning

  the low, fallen hills, sweeping

  for mines. And the matter feels primordial,

  unimaginable—dense,

  cystic, phthistic, each breast like the innards

  of a cell, its contents shifting and changing,

  streambed gravel under walking feet, it

  seems almost unpicturable, not

  immemorial, but nearly un-

  memorizable, but one marches,

  slowly, through grave or fatal danger,

  or no danger, one feels around in the

  two tackroom drawers, ribs and

  knots like leather bridles and plaited

  harnesses and bits and reins,

  one runs one’s hands through the mortal tackle

  in a jumble, in the dark, indoors. Outside–

  night, in which these glossy ones were

  ridden to a froth of starlight, bareback.

  The Riser

  When I heard that my mother had stood up after her near

  death of toxic shock, at first

  I could not get that supine figure in my

  mind’s eye to rise, she had been so

  flat, her face shiny as the ironing board’s

  gray asbestos cover. Once my

  father had gone that horizontal, he did

  not lift up, again, until he was

  fire. But my mother put her fine legs

  over the side, got her soles

  on the floor, slowly poured her body from the

  mattress into the vertical, she

  stood between nurse and husband, and they let

  go, for a second—alive, upright,

  my primate! When I’d last seen her, she was silver

  and semi-liquid, like something ladled

  onto the sheet, early form

  of shimmering life, amoeba or dazzle of

  jism, and she’d tried to speak, like matter

  trying to speak. Now she stands by the bed,

  gaunt, slightly luminous, the

  hospital gown hanging in blue

  folds, like the picture of Jesus-come-back

  in my choir book. She seemed to feel close to Jesus,

  she loved the way he did not give up,

  nothing could stop his love, he stood there

  teetering beside the stone bed and he

  folded his grave-clothes.

  Wooden Ode

  Whenever I see a chair like it,

  I consider it: the no arms,

  the lower limbs of pear or cherry.

  Sometimes I’ll take hold of the back slat

  and lift the four-legged creature off the floor to hear

  the joints creak, the wind in the timbers,

  hauling of keel rope. And the structure will not

  utter, just some music of reed and tether,

  Old Testament cradle. Whenever I see

  a Hitchcock chair—not a Federal,

  or an Eames—I pay close, furniture

  attention, even as my mind is taking its

  seablind cartwheels back. But if every

  time you saw a tree—pear,

  cherry, American elm, American

  oak, beech, bayou cypress—

  your eyes checked for a branch, low enough

  but not too low, and strong enough,

  and you thought of your uncle, or father, or brother,

  third cousin twice removed

  murdered on a tree, then you would have

  the basis for a working knowledge of American History.

  The Scare

  There was a cut clove of garlic, under

  a glass tumbler, there were spoons tarnished opal

  in a cup, there was a nesting bowl

  in a nesting bowl in a nesting bowl

  on the sill, when I understood there was a chance they might

  have to remove my womb. I bent over,

  wanting to cry out, It’s my best friend, it’s like

  having a purse of your own, of yourself, it’s like

  being where you came from, as if you are your origin,

  the basket of life, the withies, the osier

  reed weave, where your little best beloveds

  lay and took heart, took on the weights

  and measures. I love the pear shape,

  the upside-downness, the honor of bringing

  forth the living so new they can almost

  not be said to be dying yet.

  And the two who rested, without fear or elation,

  against the endometrium,

  over the myometrium, held

  around by the serosa … In the latter days,

  the unclosed top of the precious head pressed

  down on the inner os, and down on the

  outer os, and the feet played up against

  the fundus, and I could feel, in myself—

  of myself—the tale of love’s flesh.

  Soon enough, the whole small

  city of my being will demolish—what if now

  one dwelling, the central dwelling,

  the holy-seeming dwelling, might go. Like a fiber

  suitcase, in a mown field, it stands,

  its worn clasps gleaming.

  Pansy Coda

  When I see them, my knees get a little weak.

  I have to squat down close to them, I

  want to put my face in one of them.

  They are so buttery, and yet so clean.

  They have a kind of soaking-wet dryness,

  they have the tremulous chin, and the pair of

  ocular petals, and the pair of frail

  ear petals, the sweet dog face.

  Or is it like the vulva of a woman,

  or of some particular woman. My mother

  tended them—purple-black—

  when I kneel to them I am kneeling to my mother,

  who quietly shows her body to me

  whenever it can be done with the slightest pretense of dignity,

  as if it might be a pleasure to me.

  She’ll call to me, and when I come to her door

  she’ll walk across her room slowly,

  eyes focused in front of her feet

  but the corners of her eyes alert. She is so lonely

  since her husband died, she just wants to be

  naked in a room with someone, anyone,

  but her face has something eerie in its blankness,

  the eyes kept rounded—I have no idea

  what she is thinking, I get that nervous feeling

  I’ve had all my life around my mother. But when I

  see a bed of these, I kneel,

  and gaze at each one, freshly and freshly wowed,

  I love to run my thumb softly

  over the gentle jaw, I would like

  to wrap myself in a cloak of them,

  a cloak of one if it were large enough.

  I am tired of hating myself, tired

  of loathing. I want to be carried in a petal

  sling, sling of satin and cream,

  I want to be dazed, I want the waking sleep.

  Last Words,
Death Row, Circa 2030

  I am one of the ones, here,

  who did what I am said to have done.

  Look to yourselves—I was conceived the month

  you voted him in—look to the high

  court which went for execution

  and against abortion. You sentenced me

  to this life lived out till tomorrow And all

  those people I killed, they’d be with you now,

  if you’d let me die before I breathed,

  when my mother and father needed me to die.

  Would it have seemed more American to you if it

  could have been a more public demise,

  like this, if there could have been televised crowds

  chanting outside the clinic, the cervix

  magnified, on a drive-in screen,

  the fetus me six feet tall

  strapped to the table? Not that I

  have a say in this—not tonight,

  and not at eight o’clock tomorrow

  morning, when I will be one of the dead

  at last—how you have made me work for it.

  Self-Portrait, Rear View

  At first, I do not believe it, in the hotel

  triple mirror, that that is my body, in

  back, below the waist, and above

  the legs—the thing that doesn’t stop moving

  when I stop moving.

  And it doesn’t look like just one thing,

  or even one big, double thing

  —even the word saddlebags has a

  smooth, calfskin feel to it,

  compared to this compendium

  of net string bags shaking their booty of

  cellulite fruits and nuts. Some lumps

  look like bonbons translated intact

  from chocolate box to buttocks, the curl on top

  showing, slightly, through my skin. Once I see what I can

  do with this, I do it, high-stepping

  to make the rapids of my bottom rush

  in ripples like a world wonder. Slowly,

  I believe what I am seeing, a 54-year-old

  rear end, once a tight end,

  high and mighty, almost a chicken butt, now

  exhausted, as if tragic. But this is not

  an invasion, my cul-de-sac is not being

  used to hatch alien cells, ball peens,

  gyroscopes, sacks of marbles. It’s my hoard

  of treasure, my good luck, not to be

  dead, yet, though when I flutter

  the wing of my ass again, and see,

  in a clutch of eggs, each egg,

  on its own, as if shell-less, shudder, I wonder

  if anyone has ever died,

  looking in a mirror, of horror. I think I will

  not even catch a cold from it,

  I will go to school to it, to Butt

  Boot Camp, to the video store, where I saw,

  in the window, my hero, my workout jelly

  role model, my apotheosis: Killer Buns.

  The Dead

  When I ask my mother if she can remember

  if my best friend, when I was nine,

  died before, or after, her mother—

  they had sprayed their tree with lead paint

  in their closed garage—my mother describes

  how furious my friend’s father was,

  years later, when my mother and her second

  husband beat him and his second wife

  in the waltz contest. Her voice is melodious,

  she loves to win, her rival’s loss

  an erotic sweet. For a moment I see

  it would not be an entirely bad thing

  if my mother died. How interesting

  to be in the world when she was not—how

  odd to breathe air she would not recently

  have breathed. I even envision her dead,

  for a second—on her back, naked, like my father

  small, my father as a woman, her mouth

  open, as his was. Suddenly, I feel

  not afraid—as if no one will hurt me.

  And they’re together again, a moment—a bridal

  pair of things, a tongs! As if they

  delivered me like a message then were put to death.

  They cannot unmake me. I can safely thank them

  for my life. Thank you for my life.

  Sleeves

  for Edmund White

  When Edmund said he is going to Hawaii

  I was back there, 14 and never been kissed,

  and the young man I liked had asked me to go

  for a walk that evening on the beach. And what filled

  my mind, all day, were the arm-holes

  of his short-sleeved bright-flowered cotton shirt, those

  circles which seemed of the diameter

  of a pie tin—how would my hands, reaching

  to go around him as he began to hug me, not

  slip, like burrow mammals, into

  those openings, not go to ground?

  And the man was, I was telling Edmund,

  the man was, what is it called, biff,

  boff—buff, Edmund said—

  the young man was a lifeguard

  and a surfer, on the hard dune of each breast a

  nipple like a tiny scatter of sand,

  bits of coral and starfish. And of course

  my fear was desire, to pour, up,

  into him, and into myself, and

  swim, and strike together for the shore

  —where we stood, later, in the late evening, and his

  arms opened, and my arms opened,

  and the origami closed itself

  around the delicate, shut kiss.

  And the air smelled of plumeria

  and frangipangi—when the plane door

  opens, you will smell it! And Edmund said,

  You know what homosexuals

  are called in China? Cut Sleeves—

  when the emperor’s lover fell asleep

  in his arms, and lay sleeping on the silk of the royal

  robe, and the emperor had to get up,

  he cut off the sleeve of his gown, so as not

  to wake the young man, but leave him in the deeps of his dream.

  Good Measure

  Something wakes me, at my mother’s house,

  in the dark. On the back of my hand, a luminous

  wedge, a patch of Alamogordo—

  the new-risen moon, the last quarter,

  as if my mother, in her sleep, took

  a ladle, and poured this portion. Now that

  my mother loves me, I feel a little

  cheated—who will be true, anymore,

  to the years of drought? Whoever will

  be true to them can thirst in good measure

  under the glistening breast. There used to be no

  choice, for her, she was a gurdy

  of atoms swinging from each other’s elbows,

  a force of hurdy wolvine cream,

  and then, later, there was choice, she could dwell

  on herself in bitterness, or dwell on

  herself in hope. But sometimes, lately, there’s a

  motion, diurnal—when drenched with attention

  she might turn to me, with affection—that’s when I

  feel that sore resentful rib.

  They call the half moon the last

  quarter, staying faithful to the back bulge,

  to the edge between too little and too much,

  the narrow calcium line neither roasting

  nor freezing—as if one could make one’s home

  on that border, if one could just keep moving,

  nomad offspring of the stone opal

  wanderer who is borne, singing,

  across the night. My mother loves me

  with a full, child’s heart. Here is my pleynt.

  PART FOUR: Cassiopeia

  Cassiopeia

  1. He Is Take
n Away

  When they’d put her husband in the ambulance,

  my mother stood beside it, looking into

  its lighted window. It was midnight, the moon

  like a larva high against the trunk

  of the sequoia. The distant neighboring houses

  were dark, the flowering shrubs dark,

  I brought the car around, and she was

  standing there, looking in that horizontal

  picture window. I had never seen her so

  still, yet she looked so alive, so vivid,

  like a woman motionless at the moment of orgasm,

  pure attention. She was glowing, slightly,

  from the inner ambulance light, she seemed to

  have no outside or inside, her surface

  all depth,

  every cell of her body was looking at him.

  Doors slammed, I called to her, she

  turned to me, like a scrimshaw Crusader

  chess-piece rotated slowly on its base,

  she called in response, melodious,

  looking nowhere near me, she was

  made of some other material,

  wax or ivory or marble, she looked like

  Homer ready to be led around the known globe.

  2. The Music

  On the phone my mother says she has been sorting

  her late darling’s clothes—and it BREAKS

  my HEART, and then there are soft sounds,

  as if she’s been lowered down, into

  a river of music. I’m not unhappy,

  she says, this is better for me than church,

  her voice through tears like the low singing

  of a watered plant long not watered,

  she lets me hear what she feels. I could be in a

  cradle by the western shore of a sea, she could

  be a young or an ancient mother.

  Now I hear the melody

  of the one bound to the mast. It had little

  to do with me, her life, which lay

  on my life, it was not really human life

  but chemical, it was approximate landscape,

  trenches and reaches, maybe it

  was ordinary human life.

  Now my mother sounds like me,

  the way I sound to myself—one

  who doesn’t know, who fails and hopes.

  And I feel, now, that I had wanted never to stop blaming her,

  like eating hard-shelled animals

  at mid-molt. But now my mother

  is like a tiny, shucked crier