Between Poems

amid such choruses of desire

you uterus you have been patient as a sock while i have slippered into you my dead and living children now they want to cut you out stocking i will not need where i am going where am i going old girl without you uterus my bloody print my estrogen kitchen my black bag of desire where can i go barefoot without you where can you go without me

I work hard at managing, grateful and spare. I try to forgive all trespasses and give thanks for the desert. Rejoice in being alive here in my simple world. Each evening I walk for an hour, paying attention to real things. The plover sweeping at my face to get me away from its ground nest. An ant carrying the wing of a butterfly like a flag in the wind. A grasshopper eating a dead grasshopper. The antelope close up, just staring at me. Back in the house, I lie down in the heat for a nap, realizing forgiveness is hard for the wounded. Near the border, between this country and the next one.

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful

We need it for the same reason we say we grieve—for ourselves, not for those who’ve gone. For nights when touch isn’t enough and a partner’s peaceful breath will not lure us into sleep but we must stare out at the room unable to name the dark while all we’ve tried to hide roars up from the basement and follows us when we step outside ourselves, so that we hear in the traffic’s whine or the homeless man’s rage that echoes through the tunnels of the MTA the same despairing bleat that must have burst from the snout of the helpless baby when he saw his mother’s horrified gaze and understood that it fell on no gleaming hide or ears sweet to scratch but a creature angular and strange whom she could not possibly cradle, or croon to, or take as her own.

We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe. By meaningless bulk, vastness without size, power without consequence. The stubborn iteration that is present without being felt. Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon and its physics. An endless, endless of going on. No habitat where the brain can recognize itself. No pertinence for the heart. Helpless duplication. The horror of none of it being alive. No red squirrels, no flowers, not even weed. Nothing that knows what season it is. The stars uninflected by awareness. Miming without implication. We alone see the iris in front of the cabin reach its perfection and quickly perish. The lamb is born into happiness and is eaten for Easter. We are blessed with powerful love and it goes away. We can mourn. We live the strangeness of being momentary, and still we are exalted by being temporary. The grand Italy of meanwhile. It is the fact of being brief, being small and slight that is the source of our beauty. We are a singularity that makes music out of noise because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.

That year there were many deaths in the village. Germs flew like angels from one house to the next and every family gave up its own. Mothers died at their mending. Children fell at school. Of three hundred twenty, there were eleven left. Then, quietly, the sun set on a day when no one died. And the angels whispered among themselves. And that evening, as he sat on the stone steps, your grandfather felt a small wind on his neck when all the trees were still. And he would tell us always, how he had felt that night, on the skin of his own neck, the angels, passing.

O California, don’t you know the sun is only a god if you learn to starve for him? I’m bored with the ocean I stood at the lip of it, dressed in down, praying for snow I know, I’m strange, too much light makes me nervous at least in this land where the trees always bear green. I know something that doesn’t die can’t be beautiful. Have you ever stood on a frozen lake, California? The sun above you, the snow & stalled sea—a field of mirror all demanding to be the sun too, everything around you is light & it’s gorgeous & if you stay too long it will kill you & it’s so sad, you know? You’re the only warm thing for miles & the only thing that can’t shine.

and how i kissed you then and you kissed me shy as though I'd never been your lover

Maybe this world is another planet's Hell. --Aldous Huxley Sometimes it feels otherworldly, what I've felt, my heart residing in its own peculiar dark, or suddenly aglow, lit up from within. I sense then I'm on one of the good planets where mistakes and wild, venal joys lead to ordinary suffering, not banishment or doom. Whatever we must endure, doesn't it take place closer to home?  I know how I feel about murderers or men with lollipops who lead children into the woods. Still, eternal damnation doesn't do anyone any good. Most of us pay now for what we do and have done, or slide like the poor and the helpless toward the slammed gavel of a fate. That's enough, I say out loud to no one in any world. Yet here and there, though mostly here, even fate is reversible with struggle or luck. More than once I've walked under the sun and beneath the luminous moon not knowing what or whom to thank.

Imagine if suffering were real. Imagine if those old people were afraid of death. What if the midget or the girl with one arm really felt pain? Imagine how impossible it would be to live if some people were alone and afraid all their lives. 

Gathered in the heavy heat of Indiana, we've come from all over this great country, one big happy family, back from wherever we've spread ourselves too thin. A cornucopia of cousins and uncles, grand- parents and aunts, nieces and nephews, expanding. All day we laze on the oily beach; we eat all the smoke-filled evening: shrimp dip and crackers, Velveeta cheese and beer, handfuls of junk food, vanishing. We sit at card tables, examining our pudgy hands, piling in hot fudge and double-chocolate brownies, strawberry shortcake and cream, as the lard-ball children sluice from room to room. O the loveliness of so much loved flesh, the litany of split seams and puffed sleeves, sack dresses and Sansabelt slacks, dimpled knees and knuckles, the jiggle of triple chins. O the gladness that only a family understands, our fat smiles dancing as we play our cards right. Our jovial conversation blooms and booms in love's large company, as our sweet words ripen and split their skins: mulberry, fabulous, flotation, phlegmatic, plumbaginous. Let our large hearts attack us, our blood run us off the scale. We're huge and whole on this simmering night, battened against the small skinny futures that must befall all of us, the gray thin days and the noncaloric dark.

Having injured my shoulder I dream of racing down the Thames, part of a crew, sixteen-oared, octuple scull, long slender shell, symmetrical, keelless feet fixed seats glide, lock and socket, stiff-armed sweep of oars— lift of water, bracing smooth— a lubricant to be part of this synchrony, able to lean on others, ride the breastbone of a bird, without wings or even a feather.

For Linda Gregg From this distance they are unimportant standing by the sea. She is weeping, wearing a white dress, and the marriage is almost over, after eight years. All around is the flat uninhabited side of the island. The water is blue in the morning air. They did not know this would happen when they came, just the two of them and the silence. A purity that looked like beauty and was too difficult for people.

occur. Some days I find myself putting my foot in the same stream twice; leading a horse to water and making him drink. I have a clue. I can see the forest for the trees. All around me people are making silk purses out of sows’ ears, getting blood from turnips, building Rome in a day. There’s a business like show business. There’s something new under the sun. Some days misery no longer loves company; it puts itself out of its. There’s rest for the weary. There’s turning back. There are guarantees. I can be serious. I can mean that. You can quite put your finger on it. Some days I know I am long for this world. I can go home again. And when I go I can take it with me.

Don’t take it personal, they said; but I did, I took it all quite personal— the breeze and the river and the color of the fields; the price of grapefruit and stamps, the wet hair of women in the rain— And I cursed what hurt me and I praised what gave me joy, the most simple-minded of possible responses. The government reminded me of my father, with its deafness and its laws, and the weather reminded me of my mom, with her tropical squalls. Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness Think first, they said of Talk Get over it, they said at the School of Broken Hearts but I couldn’t and I didn’t and I don’t believe in the clean break; I believe in the compound fracture served with a sauce of dirty regret, I believe in saying it all and taking it all back and saying it again for good measure while the air fills up with I’m-Sorries like wheeling birds and the trees look seasick in the wind. Oh life! Can you blame me for making a scene? You were that yellow caboose, the moon disappearing over a ridge of cloud. I was the dog, chained in some fool’s backyard; barking and barking: trying to convince everything else to take it personal too.

All can be measured by the standard of the capybara. Everyone is lesser than or greater than the capybara. Everything is taller or shorter than the capybara. Everything is mistaken for a Brazilian dance craze more or less frequently than the capybara. Everyone eats greater or fewer watermelons than the capybara. Everyone eats more or less bark. Everyone barks more than or less than the capybara, who also whistles, clicks, grunts, and emits what is known as his alarm squeal. Everyone is more or less alarmed than a capybara, who—because his back legs are longer than his front legs—feels like he is going downhill at all times. Everyone is more or less a master of grasses than the capybara. Or going by the scientific name, more or less Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris— or, going by the Greek translation, more or less water hog. Everyone is more or less of a fish than the capybara, defined as the outermost realm of fishdom by the 16th-century Catholic Church. Everyone is eaten more or less often for Lent than the capybara. Shredded, spiced, and served over plantains, everything tastes more or less like pork than the capybara. Before you decide that you are greater than or lesser than a capybara, consider that while the Brazilian capybara breeds only once a year, the Venezuelan variety mates continuously. Consider the last time you mated continuously. Consider the year of your childhood when you had exactly as many teeth as the capybara— twenty—and all yours fell out, and all his kept growing. Consider how his skin stretches in only one direction. Accept that you are stretchier than the capybara. Accept that you have foolishly distributed your eyes, ears, and nostrils all over your face. Accept that now you will never be able to sleep underwater. Accept that the fish will never gather to your capybara body offering their soft, finned love. One of us, they say, one of us, but they will not say it to you.