THAT DAY

This is the desk I sit at and this is the desk where I love you too much and this is the typewriter that sits before me where yesterday only your body sat before me with its shoulders gathered in like a Greek chorus, with its tongue like a king making up rules as he goes, with its tongue quite openly like a cat lapping milk, with its tongue—both of us coiled in its slippery life. That was yesterday, that day. That was the day of your tongue, your tongue that came from your lips, two openers, half animals, half birds caught in the doorway of your heart. That was the day I followed the king’s rules, passing by your red veins and your blue veins, my hands down the backbone, down quick like a firepole, hands between legs where you display your inner knowledge, where diamond mines are buried and come forth to bury, come forth more sudden than some reconstructed city. It is complete within seconds, that monument. The blood runs underground yet brings forth a tower. A multitude should gather for such an edifice. For a miracle one stands in line and throws confetti. Surely The Press is here looking for headlines. Surely someone should carry a banner on the sidewalk. If a bridge is constructed doesn't the mayor cut a ribbon? If a phenomenon arrives shouldn't the Magi come bearing gifts? Yesterday was the day I bore gifts for your gift and came from the valley to meet you on the pavement. That was yesterday, that day. That was the day of your face, your face after love, close to the pillow, a lullaby. Half asleep beside me letting the old fashioned rocker stop, our breath became one, became a child-breath together, while my fingers drew little o's on your shut eyes, while my fingers drew little smiles on your mouth, while I drew I LOVE YOU on your chest and its drummer and whispered, "Wake upl" and you mumbled in your sleep, "Sh. We're driving to Cape Cod. We're heading for the Bourne Bridge. We're circling around the Bourne Circle." Bourne! Then I knew you in your dream and prayed of our time that I would be pierced and you would take root in me and that I might bring forth your born, might bear the you or the ghost of you in my little household. Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.

THE NUDE SWIM

On the southwest side of Capri we found a little unknown grotto where no people were and we entered it completely and let our bodies lose all their loneliness. All the fish in us had escaped for a minute. The real fish did not mind. We did not disturb their personal life. We calmly trailed over them and under them, shedding air bubbles, little white balloons that drifted up into the sun by the boat where the Italian boatman slept with his hat over his face. Water so clear you could read a book through it. Water so bouyant you could float on your elbow. I lay on it as on a divan. I lay on it just like Matisse's Red Odalisque. Water was my strange flower. One must picture a woman without a toga or a scarf on a couch as deep as a tomb. The walls of that grotto were everycolor blue and you said, "Look! Your eyes are seacolor. Look! Your eyes are skycolor." And my eyes shut down as if they were suddenly ashamed.

LOVING THE KILLER

Today is the day they shipped home our summer in two crates and tonight is All Hallows Eve and today you tell me the oak leaves outside your office window will outlast the New England winter. But then, love is where our summer was. Though I never touched a rifle, love was under the canvas, deep in the bush of Tanzania. Though I only carried a camera, love came after the gun, after the kill, after the martinis and the eating of the kill. While Saedi, a former cannibal, served from the left in his white gown and red fez, I vomited behind the dining tent. Love where the hyena laughed in the middle of nowhere except the equator. Love! Yet today our dog is full of our dead dog's spirit and limps on three legs, holding up the dead dog's paw. Though the house is full of candy bars the wasted ghost of my parents is poking the keyhole, rubbing the bedpost. Also the ghost of your father, who was killed outright. Tonight we will argue and shout, "My loss is greater than yours! My pain is more valuable!" Today they shipped home our summer in two crates wrapped in brown waxed paper and sewn in burlap. The first crate holds our personal effects, sweaty jackets, 3 lb. boots from the hold of the S.S. MORMACRIO by way of Mombassa, Dar es Salaam, Tanga, Lourence Marques and Zanzibar, through customs along with the other merchandise: ash blonde sisal like horse's tails, and hairy strings, bales of grease wool from the auctions at Cape Town and something else. BonesI Bones piled up like coal, animal bones shaped like golf balls, school pencils, fingers and noses. Oh my Nazi, with your S.S. sky-blue eye — I am no different from Emily Goering. Emily Goering recently said she thought the concentration camps were for the re-education of Jews and Communists. She thought! So far the continents stay on the map but there is always a new method. The other crate we own is dead. Bones and skins from Hold # 1 going to New York for curing and mounting. We have not touched these skulls since a Friday in Arusha where skulls lay humbly beside the Land Rover, flies still sucking on eye pits, all in a row, head by head, beside the ivory that cost more than your life. The wildebeest skull, the eland skull, the Grant's skull, the Thomson's skull, the impala skull and the hartebeest skull, on and on to New York along with the skins of zebras and leopards. And tonight our skins, our bones, that have survived our fathers, will meet, delicate in the hold, fastened together in an intricate lock. Then one of us will shout, "My need is more desperate!" and I will eat you slowly with kisses even though the killer in you has gotten out.

THE BREAK

It was also my violent heart that broke, falling down the front hall stairs. It was also a message I never spoke, calling, riser after riser, who cares about you, who cares, splintering up the hip that was merely made of crystal, the post of it and also the cup. I exploded in the hallway like a pistol. So I fell apart. So I came all undone. Yes. I was like a box of dog bones. But now they've wrapped me in like a nun. Burst like firecrackers! Held like stones! What a feat sailing queerly like Icarus until the tempest undid me and I broke. The ambulance drivers made such a fuss. But when I cried, "Wait for my courage!" they smoked and then they placed me, tied me up on their plate, and wheeled me out to their coffin, my nest. Slowly the siren, slowly the hearse, sedate as a dowager. At the E.W. they cut off my dress. I cried, "Oh Jesus, help me! Oh Jesus Christ!" and the nurse replied, "Wrong name. My name is Barbara," and hung me in an odd device, a buck's extension and a Balkan overhead frame. The orthopedic man declared, "You'll be down for a year." His scoop. His news. He opened the skin. He scraped. He pared and drilled through bone for his four-inch screws. That takes brute strength like pushing a cow up hill. I tell you, it takes skill and bedside charm and all that know how. The body is a damn hard thing to kill. But please don't touch or jiggle my bed. I'm Ethan Frome's wife. I'll move when I'm able. The T.V. hangs from the wall like a moose head. I hide a pint of bourbon in my bedside table. A bird full of bones, now I'm held by a sand bag. The fracture was twice. The fracture was double. The days are horizontal. The days are a drag. All of the skeleton in me is in trouble. Across the hall is the bedpan station. The urine and stools pass hourly by my head in silver bowls. They flush in unison in the autoclave. My one dozen roses are dead. They have ceased to menstruate. They hang there like little dried up blood clots. And the heart too, that cripple, how it sang once. How it thought it could call the shots! Understand what happened the day that I fell. My heart had stammered and hungered at a marriage feast until the angel of hell turned me into the punisher, the acrobat. My bones are loose as clothespins, as abandoned as dolls in a toy shop and my heart, old hunger motor, with its sins revved up like an engine that would not stop. And now I spend all day taking care of my body, that baby. Its cargo is scarred. I anoint the bedpan. I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it. Yet like a fire alarm it waits to be known. It is wired. In it many colors are stored. While my body's in prison, heart cells alone have multiplied. My bones are merely bored with all this waiting around. But the heart, this child of myself that resides in the flesh, this ultimate signature of the me, the start of my blindness and sleep, builds a death creche. a marriage feast until the angel of hell turned me into the punisher, the acrobat. My bones are loose as clothespins, as abandoned as dolls in a toy shop and my heart, old hunger motor, with its sins revved up like an engine that would not stop. And now I spend all day taking care of my body, that baby. Its cargo is scarred. I anoint the bedpan. I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, The figures are placed at the grave of my bones. All figures knowing it is the other death for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it. Yet like a fire alarm it waits to be known. It is wired. In it many colors are stored. While my body's in prison, heart cells alone have multiplied. My bones are merely bored with all this waiting around. But the heart, this child of myself that resides in the flesh, this ultimate signature of the me, the start of my blindness and sleep, builds a death creche. The figures are placed at the grave of my bones. All figures knowing it is the other death they came for. Each figure standing alone. The heart burst with love and lost its breath. This little town, this little country is real and thus it is so of the post and the cup and thus of the violent heart. The zeal of my house doth eat me up.

MOON SONG, WOMAN SONG

I am alive at night. I am dead in the morning, an old vessel who used up her oil, bleak and pale boned. No miracle. No dazzle. I'm out of repair but you are tall in your battle dress and I must arrange for your journey. I was always a virgin, old and pitted. Before the world was, I was. I have been oranging and fat, carrot colored, gaped at, allowing my cracked o's to drop on the sea near Venice and Mombasa. Over Maine I have rested. I have fallen like a jet into the Pacific. I have committed perjury over Japan. I have dangled my pendulum, my fat bag, my gold, gold, blinkedy light over you all. So if you must inquire, do so. After all I am not artificial. I looked long upon you, love-bellied and empty, flipping my endless display for you, you my cold, cold coverall man. You need only request and I will grant it. It is virtually guaranteed that you will walk into me like a barracks. So come cruising, come cruising, you of the blast off, you of the bastion, you of the scheme. I will shut my fat eye down, headquarters of an area, house of a dream.

THE BALLAD OF THE LONELY MASTURBATOR

The end of the affair is always death. She's my workshop. Slippery eye, out of the tribe of myself my breath finds you gone. I horrify those who stand by. I am fed. At night, alone, I marry the bed. Finger to finger, now she's mine. She's not too far. She's my encounter. I beat her like a bell. I recline in the bower where you used to mount her. You borrowed me on the flowered spread. At night, alone, I marry the bed. Take for instance this night, my love, that every single couple puts together with a joint overturning, beneath, above, the abundant two on sponge and feather, kneeling and pushing, head to head. At night alone, I marry the bed. I break out of my body this way, an annoying miracle. Could I put the dream market on display? I am spread out. I crucify. My little plum is what you said. At night, alone, I marry the bed. Then my black-eyed rival came. The lady of water, rising on the beach, a piano at her fingertips, shame on her lips and a flute's speech. And I was the knock-kneed broom instead. At night, alone, I marry the bed. She took you the way a woman takes a bargain dress off the rack and I broke the way a stone breaks. I give back your books and fishing tack. Today's paper says that you are wed. At night, alone, I marry the bed. The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.

US

I was wrapped in black fur and white fur and you undid me and then you placed me in gold light and then you crowned me, while snow fell outside the door in diagonal darts. While a ten-inch snow came down like stars in small calcium fragments, we were in our own bodies (that room that will bury us) and you were in my body (that room that will outlive us) and at first I rubbed your feet dry with a towel because I was your slave and then you called me princess. Princess! Oh then I stood up in my gold skin and I beat down the psalms and I beat down the clothes and you undid the bridle and you undid the reins and I undid the buttons, the bones, the confusions, the New England postcards, the January ten o'clock night, and we rose up like wheat, acre after acre of gold, and we harvested, we harvested.

EIGHTEEN DAYS WITHOUT YOU

December 2nd

I slept last night under a bird's shadow dreaming of nuthatches at the feeder, jailed to its spine, jailed right down to the toes, waiting for slow death in the hateful December snow. Mother's death came in the spotlight and mother slamming the door when I need her and you at the door yesterday, you at the loss, grown white, saying what lovers say. But in my dream you were a weird stone man who sleepwalked in, whose features did not change, your mouth sewn like a seam, a dressmaker's dummy who began without legs and a caved-in waist, my old puritan. You were all muslin, a faded cream and I put you in six rooms to rearrange your doors and your thread popped and spoke, ripping out an uncovered scream from which I awoke. Then I took a pill to sleep again and I was a criminal in solitary, both cripple and crook who had picked ruby eyes from men. One-legged I became and then you dragged me off by your Nazi hook. I was the piece of bad meat they made you carry. I was bruised. You could not miss. Dreaming gives one such bad luck and I had ordered this.

December 8th

In winter without you I send a Florida postcard to myself to somehow remind me of the week after mid-July and towards the end when scummy Dog Days were on the shelf and we had a week of our own to spend. Snakes snapped their venom and leftover sparklers were lit and Roman dogs sniffed the milkweed from which fertile perfume had come. Small blackcaps came bit by bit arid we came too, from our need. The sumac had red heads on display and the good blood moved into every lamb, tomatoes and snap beans under Sirius, field corn and field mice came to stay. Mornings I washed our plates of egg and jam. Our last light a whippoorwill spoke to us.