BLANKETS
She phoned me and whispered, "My mother just died."
I tried to feel something: suffering? Empathy?
Anguish? Remorse? My mother
was lying on a bed, her head slightly elevated,
thin body disappearing under mounds of blankets
that couldn't warm her. When I pressed my fingers
into the center of her palm, papery veins
pulsed watery blood. And to confront
the fact of her death was too disturbing,
perplexing, wearying:
I wanted to stay a child forever; my momma
wouldn't let me. "I'm sorry," I murmured,
in mock-dark tones, to my struggling, weeping friend:
she didn't believe me.
On my first day of first grade,
I was appointed to retrieve the cardboard Dick and Jane
from the front of the classroom. How reverently
I carried them, Jane in her glossy red dress
gazing up at me with a face that shone pure
paper happiness, Dick in his natty navy cardigan
morally excellent, decorous, his face a white spot
of scrubbed splendor. "Very good," my teacher murmured,
when I deposited them at her desk. She was twenty-seven,
massively obese, her fat calves crumpling
when she shivered her bulk from building to building.
Seven, I believed death and hell were synonymous.
And when I heard, the second week, that she'd "passed,"
I became morbidly concerned with details,
imagining the fat crass body splitting open to maggots
before they lowered it into the ground,
the mysterious Nebraska earth
sprouting shimmering frost
in the deadest of winters.
"You 're stupid," he cried.
He, nearly a baby. But I believed him. Lust
cracking open my breastbone, thrusting itself
through my pores in thickening threads of heat.
And so I trailed my inamorata. Into the music building,
where he slid into the first pewlike row,
slapped his book music open on his lap,
deliberately dropped a pencil. Fascinated, terrified,
I watched the pencil perform its slow-motion roll
across the classroom, delicately pause by a student chair.
"Get it," he murmured. "Pick it up, you jerk: then lick the floor."
I gazed straight into his eyes which shone suddenly opaque:
mesmerized, shuddery, I fell to my hands, knees,
on the cold linoleum, crawled. Around their calves,
around bobby socks sliding sloppily down girls' ankles, around
boys' pant legs pressed seam-sharp, gray,
or more drooping, tired, as if exhausted mothers
couldn't iron them. "Crawl," he urged
and I did, my knees stickier, sore,
my back so bowed a saddle could've straddled it,
the laughs sliding higher, sibilant or sharper,
my vision of maggots, dirt, my teacher's coffin
accreting so quickly through a landslide of images--
her stiff face, stitched-closed eyes, the pallor of her skin
and chin and mouth bespeaking death--
that I understood, when I reached the pencil finally,
gripped it between trembling fingers,
that the loss wasn't my teacher's, her mother's, or even my own,
that it crushed all of us in every passing.
A RISING
In that bakery, the golden scents of dark bread
waft higher, higher. That's when I remember death,
firing up the ovens in a stained smock no washings can bleach,
decrying my menial job though there are compensations, it seems,
one writer describing the arc of a life as established
by the age of fifteen. I pound bread dough with my strong,
trembling fist, roll and squeeze stomachy white
until sweat in its suppleness, messiness, warmth
nearly makes me sick. There's no denying that arc
in myself. Or others. As if, at mid-apex,
we recognized it yet couldn't accept it.
Hot yeast coating my nostrils
so, when I smell a yellow rose, axle grease,
steam wafting off a dog turd dropped crumbling into snow,
my mind proclaims only bakery. Bakery and a world:
he was ninety-seven, adrift, clouds opaquing eyes
a tender bloodshot blue. Lived in a Barcalounger
where I fed him meals, plates of steaming gravied stew
in green Westminster bowls, propped the tray on his lap,
made certain he could swallow, the bright white ghosts of TV
streaming across his pupils until the world shrank
to the glassiness of his fixed stare.
He suffocated rather than died, gone so fiercely
it was as if I'd cupped my palm over a bottle-mouth
a gray moth struggled against, flapping and flapping
until silvery motes of dust floated up from his wings,
and in the coffin, staring up, his face bore the same
starved grimace I'd imagined from The Grapes of Wrath,
that old dying man curling forward into my arms,
the memory of some primordial milk
stirring inside my breasts though I knew
I could never have children.
THE SIREN
All truth is relative, my students claim. In class, restless,
I pace, craving a smoke. My black-ashed lungs longing for suffocation, release,
though it's my sister I dream about, teaching Ray Carver's Cathedral.
The Family Intellectual, I tumble into ideas easily as red-gold leaves
awaiting autumn bagging. But I know she's at home, baby on her hip, eyes
cloudy with the vision of that length of rubber hose laid out in her Buick.
She's never been happy. I'm certain her life's a waste.
It's a thought I'd never utter. Have some goddamned compassion, my stoic
mother cries. From room to room she wanders, drowning in oceans of sound
overflowing from the tiny T.V.; Father spills another beer.
I know what "compassion" means: never utter what you believe. Even if provoked.
She's weaker, not a survivor. Had a difficult birth. Excruciating
childhood. And when I conjure my baby sister, she's wrapped in blue-black hair
she scarcely ever washes, beautiful despite her filth, mesmerizing men with loss.
THEOLOGIES
It was confusing. The Christians worshipped a dead bleeding man
slung from four nails. The Hindus revered stones, which, they claimed,
possessed "the reverence of all life-energy." Nine, I wandered slam-bang
Wham into the milkiest opaquest puddle. It'd formed while I was jailed
in classes, the rotting rain water mounting, mounting,
until the underpass floated crimson cars, until people strolled everywhere
senseless, stunned, water bleeding down faces hoisted for mesmerizing
downpours. In muck sloshing over my waist, bevies of pink worms escalated
their drowning, spilled out writhing, cast by surging waves that flooded
their membranes, smothered their skins' breathing. Lost in my shiny gold boots,
I thrashed observing their deaths. The dead man, rocks, the ugly
graying worms becoming split remnants: nothing good
arose from destruction. Yet there seemed beauty in worms
pink-faced as babies before their abrupt demise, in rocks shimmering paler
with slick glosses of rain, in the unGodly figure plucking me from deep water.
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