Dear Eros - Traci Brimhall
From "Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod".
I have found you where I shouldn't -- in the wrong bodies,
at the wrong time, and once on a subway platform
with my feet stuck to a dried pool of soda, taking gum
from a near-stranger's mouth. That night you were spearmint
and the 6 train. I have been woken by you, put to bed by you.
Had you serve me coffee in my favourite mug with milk
and just enough sweetness. An easy gift. A debt of pleasure.
My therapist said: Sometimes it's better to be understood than it is
to be loved. I believed her because I am better at understanding
than I am at feeling. I have said I love you to men whose names
I can't remember now. And who's to say it wasn't true?
Who's to say I couldn't have tried forever with any of them?
Couldn't have tried learning to sail and opened a sanctuary
for elephants, or perfected the tambourine and followed
the band on their bluegrass tour? I don't know why anyone stays
in their marriage, my therapist said. Love is illogical. Once, a man
I loved raped me. I did not leave him. At least not then.
But the next time I loved, I chose someone kinder. I thought it would make a difference. I stopped meeting people's eyes
when talking to them, because I couldn't stop wanting to
kiss them, the intimacy of language turning into metaphor
and urge. Everyone. I wanted to kiss the cashier handling
my poblanos with such gentleness and curiosity. To kiss
the person next to me on the bus with bad taste in music,
and vanilla and bergamot in his cologne. Kiss the woman
holding the door, saying: Have a good day. Her smile
so goddamn bright and real and meant for me.
You're trapped, my therapist tells me. Only you can break
this cycle. But I have sweat between my breasts that needs
licking. I have an iamb in my chest that keeps skipping.
I have stockings on my thighs. Oh, I've got stockings
on my thighs that need ripping. I read my way through
all the paperback romances and I need a more adequate
fiction. I need my hair pulled, mean and gentle. I dressed
you up in every excuse and black gloves past the elbow.
You open the silk in me with zippers and buttons sewed
on with breakable thread. I have pulled tinsel from your hair
and called it mistletoe, led you into the woods wearing cheap
underwear and handed you the switchblade from my boot.
I worshipped the myth I made of you, but I'm off my knees
now. I want your hands to become language and make me
offer you one thigh at a time. Let it sting loud and sweetly.
Let the bruise be the proof. Let the smell of your hands.
You're not supposed to be here. You belong
in lower altitudes where air thickens with heat,
where your pleasures are ruthless and your words
are sweet. You accused me of hiding in beauty,
but what a breathless place to vanish, like this height,
this mountain, these snowdrifts names penitentes
for how they appear like ascetics on their knees.
I have asked my knees for so much. I asked a man
to hurt me like a professional. He asked if I liked pain
or humiliation more. How cruel to make me choose.
Darwin described these snowfields -- with their tall
narrow peaks -- as a crowd of penitents. I want to admire
the attitude of submission, but I want God's anger
more, want to rose the Old Testament in me,
want to be both hand and cheek. Even when God
flooded the world, he loved it. Even when he promised
to destroy it again with cleansing fire. That's the way
I want to love. Soul, you raw little pea, there's nowhere
left to hide. Here at a border of Earth and atmosphere,
what you obscure with image reveals you, too. This isn't
prayer, it's what pleasure sounds like with two fingers
in your mouth. The fingers aren't yours, but the taste is.
I'd come here to look at the stars, but cones of snow
keep telling me to forgive, or to beg for it. There's no
escaping the desire to be unmade. Eroded. Even snow
knows it's unclean. Each flake makes its geometry
around dust, where everything begins. No one knows
why penitentes always face the sun, but I know why
I face it. To the man who told me, Choose, I said:
Call me what I am but hurt me, too. Let this pleasure be
a penance. I will suffer it again. Ask me to--
He was always a winged thing and I was always
a grave, an openness. That's how we knew
our belonging and how we knew it wouldn't last.
I was too bloodless, staining our garage with new
prayers of anger and broken coffee cups. The homes
we made in each other gave us bouquets torn from
spring branches, four walls we mortgaged, and dishes
shaking in their cupboards. We used to walk
the arboretum and subtract ducklings each week
without any grief. The old celery fields smelled
of cinnamon some days. Others mint. I'd jump
on his back as if we were young, nearly innocent,
with laughs as dark as our halos. I wished Always
but the dandelion seeds were stubborn, everything
ripe refused my mouth. When I said Come home,
it was a lie, but I believed it. For a year I was light
shaking on the surface of the water, a fire softening
into a flood, and once his hand around my arm
like a snake circling a branch in Eden. Not all secrets
are shames, and this one isn't either. It's the pale
green of healing. It's my lips opening like parentheses
and his name inside, it's turning back from the wrong
north, the moon like a slice of raw onion, my skin
weeping like a fever, closing the question with my hand
around my other arm so I'll match, so I'll burn.
I did this to myself, I know. You are not mine
but come as wind clotted with the end of a season.
Did you know all a ginkgo's leaves fall on the same day?
Sometimes it's called maidenhair. For its beauty.
For how easily it quakes. Of course you know,
you expert on falling. Did you know a friend told me
that the first thing he learned in a rescue class was how
to break the arm of the person he was trying to save?
But what if this time the only person I want to save
is myself? I would ask what I have to break, but I know.
My therapist: You're resiliant. You don't just survive trauma;
you thrive in it. Did you know the ginkgo excels at healing
itself? Surely you who made yourself in the image of
a Madonna with a glacial face and a bloody fist in
the chest know what it means to make your heart
an ocean. Mine is greedy, weak. In my best moments,
it might be Lake Eyre, flooded for six months with useless
abundance, dry the rest. But not you, not your stubborn
metaphor. Thank you for that combustible muscle--
I mean that -- it can't be easy to open both sides of a robe
and bear that much tenderness for strangers. To accept
so much terrible need. I've done it, though. You know
I sat naked next to electric heaters in dusty classrooms
while the circle around me attempted my widening hips
and unclenched hands in charcoal. I even kept a sketch
to remember myself young, nearly pretty, a perfect
subject who didn't mind vulnerability and stillness until
the timer chimed. When someone offered to hurt me
any way I wanted, I put my hand around my throat.
That time, choosing it. Where do you keep your secrets?
I know. The bottom of your vestments where the blue
takes over. That purple pulp of you finds spark and oxygen
and convinces everyone you've given all you have, but
you're holding back. We all do. I can be as impatient
as any gingko in October, but I can hold my hand over
the back burner, low heat, burn colder, oh watch me bear it,
watch me break, wait for the robe to drop from my shoulder.
I asked my son which part of his body he loved most.
He said his skeleton. I always used to think I loved
my feet, a quarter of my bones splayed into fans,
the nerves so bright and easy to please. A friend's daughter
showed me the bones she'd filed in an old card catalog.
I handed each one back, the dull heat of rot traded
for the glare-white of a bare rib, fleshless cradle of hip,
heft of femur on a mantel. She and I shared our love
of lemons, and she taught me witch in her made-up language
so I could call myself by the proper word. The invented one.
I held myself against the hard belly of those vowels,
that black glyph of a name. The pulse I once felt
when my son turned inside me thrummed against my hand.
Tonight, the splinter I let live in my thumb finally worked
its way out of my flesh, the wound larger than the weapon.
I asked my son which part of his life he loved most.
He said crying. Because it felt so good to stop
when he was happy again. The daughter shows me
the thin hair of roots whitening the soil in a jar.
She had made this small wilderness and given it life.
When my marriage was failing, I offered to take care
of my friend's succulent. It was almost winter. Everything
was going gray. So when the plant began to bloom,
I welcomed its dusty pollen until the kitchen smelled
like carrion and bone dust. The house grewheavy with need,
with an ache I understood. The smell of death was simple
to answer. I knew what those fetid yellow stars required.
I opened the back door to invite the flies to their desire.
You say Eden disappeared open the book and read
but the sea which no one tends is also a garden
Our prayers rise wingless and nighted by frost
The angel's fossil burns like alcohol across the mouth
of a wound Forget the dull evangelical vision
still springs and fruits beneath the fathoms
The snowflake eel caught in a birdcage You're safe enough
inside the harpooned cachalot It's fine if you're ribbed
with echoes and nets For too long I stayed an untended bed
of starfish Now I follow the coven of thunderheads
I don't want suffering to offer its thesis I want out
of exile and back to a garden where we can confuse
innocence with goodness I want the christening of thunder
My love witches a second chance from the bottom of the sea
I believe in the way ice heals itself in the way a fish accepts
the lesson of the hook Take your mouth off
my breast the world isn't there So much forgiveness
awaits us the green seas part as the angel approaches
