TWO SONS

Where and to whom you are married I can only guess in my piecemeal fashion. I grow old on my bitterness. On the unique occasion of your two sudden wedding days I open some cheap wine, a tin of lobster and mayonnaise. I sit in an old lady’s room where families used to feast where the wind blows in like soot from north-northeast. Both of you monopolized with no real forwarding address except for two silly postcards you bothered to send home, one of them written in grease as you undid her dress in Mexico, the other airmailed to Boston from Rome just before the small ceremony at the American Church. Both of you made of my cooking, those suppers of starch and beef, and with my library, my medicine, my bath water, both sinking into small brown pools like muddy otters! You make a toast for tomorrow and smash the cup, letting your false women lap the dish I had to fatten up. When you come back I’ll buy a wig of yellow hair; I’ll squat in a new red dress; I’ll be playing solitaire on the kitchen floor. Yes ... I’ll gather myself in like cut flowers and ask you how you are and where you’ve been.

July 22, 1963

FOR THE YEAR OF THE INSANE

a prayer

O Mary, fragile mother, hear me, hear me now although I do not know your words. The black rosary with its silver Christ lies unblessed in my hand for I am the unbeliever. Each bead is round and hard between my fingers, a small black angel. O Mary, permit me this grace, this crossing over, although I am ugly, submerged in my own past and my own madness. Although there are chairs I lie on the floor. Only my hands are alive, touching beads. Word for word, I stumble. A beginner, I feel your mouth touch mine. I count beads as waves, hammering in upon me. I am ill at their numbers, sick, sick in the summer heat and the window above me is my only listener, my awkward being. She is a large taker, a soother. The giver of breath she murmurs, exhaling her wide lung like an enormous fish. Closer and closer comes the hour of my death as I rearrange my face, grow back, grow undeveloped and straight-haired. All this is death. In the mind there is a thin alley called death and I move through it as through water. My body is useless. It lies, curled like a dog on the carpet. It has given up. There are no words here except the half-learned, the Hail Mary and the full of grace. Now I have entered the year without words. I note the queer entrance and the exact voltage. Without words they exist. Without words one may touch bread and be handed bread and make no sound. O Mary, tender physician, come with powders and herbs for I am in the center. It is very small and the air is gray as in a steam house. I am handed wine as a child is handed milk. It is presented in a delicate glass with a round bowl and a thin lip. The wine itself is pitch-colored, musty and secret. The glass rises on its own toward my mouth and I notice this and understand this only because it has happened. I have this fear of coughing but I do not speak, a fear of rain, a fear of the horseman who comes riding into my mouth. The glass tilts in on its own and I am on fire. I see two thin streaks burn down my chin. I see myself as one would see another. I have been cut in two. O Mary, open your eyelids. I am in the domain of silence, the kingdom of the crazy and the sleeper. There is blood here and I have eaten it. O mother of the womb, did I come for blood alone? O little mother, I am in my own mind. I am locked in the wrong house.

August 1963

KE 6-8018

Black lady, two eyes, low as tobacco, who inked you in? The shoemaker could not do it, nor the sculptor nor the cubist. Trunk is what you are, with two washbowls. You are a sweetener, a drawer of blood - that’s all, a hot voice, an imminence and then a death. Why death? Death’s in the goodbye. My love, when you leave in which crevice will you hide? What signs will remain? Black slime will not come of it, nor backwash from the traveler. You will rest Like a drowned bat upon my shoulder. In one hand I will have to hold that silence. There will be no track anymore. There will be only that peculiar waiting. There will be nothing to pick up. There will be nothing. There will have been a house - a house that I knew, the center of it, a tiny heart, synthetic though it was making that thin buzz-buzz like a sly beetle. Black lady, what will I do without your two flowers? I have inhabited you, number by number. I have pushed you in and out like a needle. Funny digits, I have danced upon your trunk and I have knelt on your torso. With my words I have perjured my soul. Take note - there will be an absence. It will be a cancer, spreading like a white dog who doubles back, not knowing his name. Although I will inherit darkness I will keep dialing left to right. I will struggle like a surgeon. I will call quickly for the glare of the moon. I will even dial milk. I will hold the thread that was fished through the ceiling that leads to the roof, the pole, the grass, that ends in the sea. I will not wait at the rail looking upon death, that single stone. I will call for the boy-child I never had. I will call like the Jew at the gate. I will dial the wound over and over and you will not yield and there will be nothing, black lady, nothing, although I will wait, unleashed and unheard.

January 3, 1964

WANTING TO DIE

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember. I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage. Then the almost unnameable lust returns. Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention, the furniture you have placed under the sun. But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic. In this way, heavy and thoughtful, warmer than oil or water, I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole. I did not think of my body at needle point. Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone. Suicides have already betrayed the body. Still-born, they don’t always die, but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet that even children would look on and smile. To thrust all that life under your tongue! - that, all by itself, becomes a passion. Death’s a sad bone; bruised, you’d say, and yet she waits for me, year after year, to so delicately undo an old wound, to empty my breath from its bad prison. Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet, raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon, leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss, leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

February 3, 1964

A LITTLE UNCOMPLICATED HYMN

for Joy

is what I wanted to write. There was such a song! A song for your kneebones, a song for your ribs, those delicate trees that bury your heart; a song for your bookshelf where twenty hand-blown ducks sit in a Venetian row; a song for your dress-up high heels, your fire-red skate board, your twenty grubby fingers, the pink knitting that you start and never quite finish; your poster-paint pictures, all angels making a face, a song for your laughter that keeps wiggling a spoon in my sleep. Even a song for your night as during last summer’s heat wave where your fever stuck at 104 for two weeks, where you slept, head on the window sill, lips as dry as old erasers, your thirst shimmering and heavy as I spooned water in, your eyes shut on the thumping June bugs, the lips moving, mumbling, sending letters to the stars. Dreaming, dreaming, your body a boat, rocked by your life and my death. Your fists wound like a ball, little fetus, little snail, carrying a rage, a leftover rage I cannot undo. Even a song for your flight where you fell from the neighbor’s tree hut, where you thought you were walking onto solid blue air, you thought, why not? and then, you simply left the boards behind and stepped out into the dust. O little Icarus, you chewed on a cloud, you bit the sun and came tumbling down, head first, not into the sea, but hard on the hard packed gravel. You fell on your eye. You fell on your chin. What a shiner! What a faint you had and then crawled home, a knocked-out humpty dumpty in my arms. O humpty-dumpty girl, I named you Joy. That’s someone’s song all by itself. In the naming of you I named all things you are ... except the ditch where I left you once, like an old root that wouldn’t take hold, that ditch where I left you while I sailed off in madness over the buildings and under my umbrella, sailed off for three years so that the first candle and the second candle and the third candle burned down alone on your birthday cake. That ditch I want so much to forget and that you try each day to forget. Even here in your school portrait where you repeat third grade, caught in the need not to grow - that little prison - even here you keep up the barrier with a smile that dies afraid as it hides your crooked front tooth. Joy, I call you and yet your eyes just here with their shades half-drawn over the gunsights, over your gigantic knowledge, over the little blue fish who dart back and forth, over different streets, the strange rooms, other people’s chairs, other people’s food, ask, “Why was I shut in the cellar?” And I’ve got words, words that dog my heels, words for sale you might say, and multiplication cards and cursive writing that you ignore to teach my fingers the cat’s cradle and the witch’s broom. Yes! I have instructions before dinner and hugs after dinner and still those eyes - away, away, asking for hymns ... without guilt. And I can only say a little uncomplicated hymn is what I wanted to write and yet I find only your name. There was such a song, but it’s bruised. It’s not mine. You will jump to it someday as you will jump out of the pitch of this house. It will be a holiday, a parade, a fiesta! Then you’ll fly. You’ll really fly. After that you’ll, quite simply, quite calmly make your own stones, your own floor plan, your own sound. I wanted to write such a poem with such musics, such guitars going; I tried at the teeth of sound to draw up such legions of noise; I tried at the breakwater to catch the star off each ship; and at the closing of hands I looked for their houses and silences. I found just one. you were mine and I lent you out. I look for uncomplicated hymns but love has none.

March 1965