Balladz, page 2
been beaten outside my gender, or my family, or my color.
8 Steps of 2 Steps Down
First there was a sudden rattle.
Then, loud clattering and crunching.
It seemed to be coming from below me, I went
to the top of the basement stairs and turned on the
light and turned my big feet to the
side and walked down the narrow steps
between the steep risers, and over to the tame
infernal furnace. Somewhere inside it there were
snaps and crackles and pops like the elves with
our initials on the cereal box—we born
of plenty, and ignorant of the fact.
In the morning the oil man came in his truck,
and we put on our masks and bowed to each other
in a feudal dance, and he descended. When he left,
he said a mouse had gone into the fan. Now I
know what it sounds like when someone enters the system.
After
After the quarter-ton bear walks past me,
left to right, six feet away,
I notice that now I start breathing heavily
halfway up my dozen stairs—then I
lie on the bed and pant for a while.
And the tremor is worse, so that, when I’m cooking, I am
literally throwing a few ingredients together,
salt and sugar and raw rice on the floor around my feet.
My equipment for staying alive is wearing out,
my screen when I close it leaks bone-gel on the keys,
and the skin of my forearms hangs down in watered-silk rivulets.
I think I had thought I might be spared the extreme of dying.
On one of his last nights, my darling began caroling,
mad songs, as his brain was going—wild and terrible
but funny, too, I think I thought I might
live for 100 more years to describe those solos.
And Galway—maybe I would go on and on singing him since he no
longer could.
But when I saw, in the last portrait, Willy’s eyebrow
still cocked as if hunting, attentive to something at a distance,
one canine curved, a milk-thorn in his mouth,
and the bedlinen his body was wrapped in tied at the waist in a
powerful knot,
Willy’s head emerging as a curly off-white harvest bouquet.
My mouth warbled and my eyes poured
as if from the watercolor of the blue pitcher resting on his
winding-sheet
with the blue Thank You—Willy in his cloud
setting into the mountain.
Someday I will run out of tears—
they are honored now to be shedding for Willy and Bwindi,
and Galway and Charlie. And maybe, if I’m lucky,
Bobbie and Catherine might bundle me up for my wash-day,
wrap me in swaddling clothes and lay me
in the manger of the earth, with Carl, and Hazel.
Anatomy Lesson for the Officer
That is your head. That is your heart.
Elbow, bicep, knee, thigh.
And the valve in back of you, your behind,
I think it may be a genital part which
holds your genital part from in front.
I am not saying Go f. yourself.
You have done that. You have f’d our species.
I am saying, That is your holster, your gun,
your handcuffs. And those are his hands in your cuffs.
And that is a human throat you are kneeling
on. That is our throat, our brother’s,
our son’s, maybe our father’s throat.
That is your mother’s, your father’s, your son’s,
your daughter’s throat. That is your daughter’s throat.
My Head and My Mother’s Breast in Quarantine Together
After nine months safe and well
in a room alone, I was sitting facing
the afternoon
winter sunlight,
a magnifying mirror propped
on the windowsill. Some skin over my
breastbone was swollen, I pressed down
and in, on either side of the tiny hill.
And where had I ever seen a snake
strike by flying through the air, but out of the
little half-egg mound a six-inch
viper, yellow-green, shot,
and I pushed again, and a second Worme
(medieval for a dragon) streaked.
EEUUwww, as anyone sane would say,
anyone raised by a mother who kept larvae
in jars with leaves—they named one
“Mommy’s Disgusting.” As a child I had seen how my
mother looked at her drunken husband,
and now I had expelled the devil, like
gangrene reptile milk from my rib-skin.
Maybe this is the pornography
the great critic sniffed out in me.
There’s not much some of us can see of the world,
solo in a room, like sitting on my
mother’s lap in the car, on the highway, when my
dad swerved as we passed a woman’s
leg separated from her torso on the macadam
highway and my mom with angelic aplomb
turned my head into her breast.
Centipede
Woken sober supine—at the top of the wall,
along the edge of the ceiling—
the blurred, oval dark of a roof-leak
or a creature. Put on glasses, pick up
binoculars—
a jointed insect, 6 inches long,
8 inches with the fringe of its legs
oval around it,
antennae the length of its body again
at the front. If I could have spared it, if I could have
caught and released—but slept while it woke
above my open mouth? I got
the junior broom—and missed. The creature
let go,
slid down
the wall onto my bureau—it rippled,
silky and swirling, over embroider—and the
centispear of straws stabbed down,
scattering crystal and jet, and then the
acrobat swivel dancer crawled
forward away from its back two dozen
legs, and turned over slowly, in its fine
tassels. Of course I am a killer, I am
human. There had been two lives
in the apartment, now there is one. Outside
the window and down, the flame poplar
sways south and north, mourning for the earth.
Yes
Did you forget you’d killed it. Did you go back a week later
looking for it, did you pick up the coral and
turquoise necklace like the one you gave Muriel—
sea where mountain was, mountain
where sea. And the one made of the tiniest shells—
magenta, ivory, brown, from Niihau,
which Carl gave you, and the Jane Austen pendant from lucille.
Are you a ravener of your home.
When you saw the reversed teacup did you
remember the remains were under it.
Were you curious to see them. Would you look at them
with an eye eager, self-pitying, moral, aesthetic.
And how had you killed them. With a small broom used
as a clutch of straw daggers.
And when you were in your hunting frenzy
did you feel fear, and horror, and a spear-aimer’s
attention. And under the cup now do you find
a compound eye,
and labium, thread, antennae,
metathorax curved, meso
segmented, mandible palps for
biting, sucking, sipping—and some
of the hundred legs, spotted trochanter and
coxa, femur and tibia, translucent
barbed feet. Is this the one who
flowed like an oval of shadow up
the wall, a nimbus. Is it impossible
for me to be good. Is it possible for us
to try harder to kill this planet
slower. Would I kill this animal again
if it did its undulation above me
along the wall. Is this the best that I can
do this morning to work against the killing
done in my name all over the earth.
Quarantine Argiope
Some kind of egg-sac was fitted into the
angle between a 12-bevel doorframe
and the wallpaper,
by the door inside whose transom window
a herd of blue mud-dauber wasps
had commandeered a paper-wasp nest
close to the porch past which the 500-pound
bear had trudged. Today I looked closer—
something like a giant bald
bumblebee, nesting in a shell—
an inch-fat spider. With a juice glass
and a large postcard,
I trapped the glorious dancer—a female
Argiope, the one who sleeps in her
nest outdoors next to her woven
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z’s. Her dorsal pattern was like lichen,
the edges of each petal lifted—
her great omphalos back ocher,
the irregular spots cream, she drew in her
yellow legs with their bright black joints. I took her
down to the pond, laid the tumbler near a
cross-snatch loom of weeds,
and watched till she waddle-picked her way out, and
finicked up
several stems which
gave, under her massy weight.
The marks on her back were luminous:
an archer’s bow pulled all the way back.
Now the first flicker of the fall
is jumping low, along the lawn,
sipping the long
worms up.
The orb spider mother is safe in the meadow.
Tomorrow her web will span a foot,
the sleep we will share rising silver in the
air around her. I could not kill her to be
sure she would not come into my room in the
middle of the night and lie down on me
to pray. I could not kill her now,
to prevent that.
Not Once
Not once—not when I toppled, rigid, a
5'7" pole-pine felled,
stiff as a board, a five and a half foot
plank, 16 x 32,
and not while I wallowed on the rug among
his oxygen tubes, and my cane, and his 8
wheelchair wheels, and not when I sat by his
hospice bed, chirping I’m fine!
and not the next day, when the brilliant violet
and charcoal slashed and slathered in my easy-life skin,
or days later when the purple turned yellow and the
blue green—never once when I
said No pain, Nothing broken,
did I feel lucky, did I measure the force of the
blow, the floor speeding up like a heavyweight’s
smash to my cheek and eyebrow. Not until today
did I begin to feel grateful
for my good fortune—no concussion, no
fracture—as if I had expected I’d be able to be
struck by the earth, a wrecking ball,
and not feel it—
as when someone on the other side of the world,
or the city, is struck in my name, I do not feel it.
Meditation During the Sufferings and Deaths of Others
I did not deserve to be beaten,
and I did not deserve ballet lessons—
except insofar as everyone deserves ballet lessons.
Me mum thought I was well worth beating.
She would not have thought that I deserved to starve.
I deserved the milk in her breasts—I had put it there.
When I was a baby, she withheld food to clock-train me.
She did not notice she was privileged
always to have enough food to feed her children.
And there were books in the house, I did not deserve them
except insofar as everyone deserves them.
I did not notice it was luck that I had them,
that for every book I had, someone else did not have one.
But it was not just luck that my mother beat me.
I was the second daughter of the second daughter of the second
daughter,
the one on whom the mothers in that line
exercised their so-far sonlessness.
I did not have a second daughter,
or she was the tiny thing lost to that long-ago flu.
I did not inherit the taste for beating children
or the belief it was the only way to make them behave.
But how did I know that every soul was equal? They kept saying so.
And you could see it, around some people’s body,
the space around it, the light in the space,
a kind of envelope, or surface tension,
as if they were whole. Those were the popular kids, the kind ones.
I did not deserve their friendship,
but sometimes I got it—because I made them laugh.
I think I was born funny—born seeing funny.
There was what they said, and what they meant, and what they did.
There was a disjunct—and it hit my funny bone,
and then like a xylophone player I hit their funny bone
and we flushed and heated and gave out the sweet percussion of our
squeaky barking.
I had the luck to earn their laughter.
But so much lies outside deserving.
I do not deserve this house.
But I do not deserve someone
breaking in and killing me.
I chose ballet lessons because I loved dancing, and the feeling, like
begging to be liked—a kind of sneaky labor.
Going to Miss Pring’s garage was like walking into a church hymn and
being its turning.
What does deserve even mean? It means dessert
when you have eaten every bite on your plate.
The concept of dessert presupposes a ruler—
second daughter of a second, or not.
And when you become your own ruler?
When you rise through the dead leaves, the pieces of torn web, the
trails of slugs, when you become a guttersnipe and lift your
head and look around,
you can see the chaos,
you can choose to work toward some small justice.
I look at my life, Chaim, and I see us,
that taste we had for each other, and the peace
of telling each other the truth.
And we earned the peace
in the hard crib of the hospice bed, I would
climb up into it and cram myself next to you, we would murmur and sleep.
I like how we looked, cotyledon
fit into itself in the steel cradle like a
capsule sent out into space, to start over.
Before the Electric Traps Arrived
In the morning, there was gore on the bathroom floor,
sexagon of grout archil
red—when I looked it up I thought it was
Achilles red, like Aethelred,
as if there had been a sword fight on the tile—
gore particulate as cudbear,
the sign of a murder, there,
the trap upside down, right to left like a sturdy Hebrew letter.
So many drops of plasma the color of hematite,
the mineral form of iron oxide—
Fe2O3—rust,
and something between Vermilion, and Madder, and Dragon’s Blood.
In the book, arkil red is near archaic smile,
mouse is near serpent’s mound in Ohio—500 feet long—
and orkil is near Orchidopexy,
Surg., fixation of a movable testicle. I knelt to the calligraph,
I was thinking who am I less unlike, Hypatia,
executed by means of being scraped with mussel and oyster shells,
for being good at math,
or the musculus—the Muscle Mouse—
vole m., harvest m., pocket m., jumping m.
There was nothing left in the plastic jaws
but one long toenail like the bone the children held out through the
cage-holes for the witch to finger,
and splashes of lenticular disks on the white porcelain of the toilet base,
each shallow saucer of dried maroon fluid like a platelet.
I kneeled in my black kimono and washed the bolt cap,
and the siphon like a snake or a kink intestine, I
bent over the liquid heavens of the underworld,
printing my knee with thistle-bait, canoe-shape, hard rodent turds, I
could not tell my slat from my lap, my oven from my haven,
