BOOKS
I tasted them too. The fat azure binding of A Tale of Two Cities
satisfyingly waxy, War and Peace unsucculent, flavored lightly with mold
from the trunk of my mother's car. When we moved, the books glowed richer
after dark, tiny, mesmerizing nightlamps we huddled around, staring, older
since my father's death. The quick succession of cities, alleys, soup
kitchens crammed with shoving sweating strangers, my hands wrapping fists
tighter around Momma's knees. But the books were always waiting, good
Christian fun, my mother described them, stuffed dust-gathering or wistful
into cardboard obliterating them for hours while we braved that universe
of new despair. And when we returned home, the crinkly government check
folded in Momma's fingers, the books awaited us, opened, banishing our fears
of ignorance. Their plump leather covers, silver, cerulean, blood-red, emerald,
adorned our gray peeling dining room like a mixed-flower bouquet.
And when we woke, before black bitter coffee stirred us to sentience, they did.
A MODERN BERNADETTE
And if her mother was confined to her bed, if her job
at a paper factory sank rot into her bones
until that striated marrow stank, until, shriveling
atop a stained mattress, she castigated, nights, a broken-tiled ceiling,
the act of spooning cereal purposeless, unprimordial
since she'd glimpsed a lit vision through blackening branches
that'd made her heart shatter, then--whole--leap away like a whitened roe,
I knew better than to question her pain. Striding that green-yellow enchanted
realm, I sought what she sought, suffering having toughened me
until my bones wouldn't snap
though hers would in a flash, not fragile but calcified, too beautiful,
until I sensed, beneath skin, how they shimmered like dipped milk, grand
as Our Lady, white-cowled and hovering in sheets of gray rain,
as Bernadette's wracked face, transformed by Christ's pain.
THE SPECTACLE OF BERNADETTE SOUBIROUS IN HER CASKET
It's an obscenity: maybe. The way crowds circle her casket,
gesticulating, praying, as if that still, dead body empathized
with pedestrian pain. I know she's a saint. Yet I madden
at any small hand threatening to press against glass deriving
its radiance from a spiritual suffering. Even dead, she possesses grace.
I know how she died. The vision, searing red lights, the calling out
to the Virgin to comfort her when silence, yawning wider, ached
to swallow her, fever striking her white-cold in waves--her falling
into a hole where black thick mud shoveled atop her bones was the nightmare
she woke to daily, her death hovering around some corner nuns passed
stiffly praying. But if Death is a sadist, does weariness
signal submission? She wasn't a masochist, I want to cry out to all
sentient crowds. Wasn't your Christ. Relinquish her, deelevate her,
forget her forever and let her decay.
THE ROADKILL ARTIST
When she caressed that blue vase, I believed it was my skin.
She'd stroked grotesquer things: toads, lizards, pungent with death.
An anthropologist, no; biologist, no: breath succulent with gin.
In the museum, when she touched my hand, I imagined her so fiercely in bed
that red room dipped and swayed; black floaters marred my sight.
My passions uncontrollable, hers, a Soho artist by morning,
a roadkill excavator by night, driving at three a.m. with a flashlight
to pry a bloodsplashed raccoon from the road, that mess of tail her mourning,
she claimed, for a world refusing her sex, meaning, majesty, pain--
though what she denied, I believed, was herself, the roughening
touch of her wet bedroom hands poured into the same
artifacts she judged solipsistic--that vase's irrelevancy extending
to me, breathing quietly beside her in that longing-choked room,
to the injured hawk she lifted, gloved, cold-washed with moon.
THE BODY AS GRAVESITE, SURROUNDED BY THREE CROWS
And if the Romantics taught us to view death as morbid,
what can we unlearn? In this cemetery, the usual plethora of tiny
white crosses, stones crumbling back decades until the mind can't orbit
centuries mentioned as if in a whisper, as if in a hangman's mind-
set. But history, some poet told us, is detritus alone. I'm seeking
one gravestone. It hasn't been erected. Like other morbid mavericks, I've a list
of compelling obsessions. From the age of five, I've longed to create
this tableau of my death. There is no funeral. No one would attend. Pick
a friend, and I don't have one: like Rand, an individualist too, I'm addicted
to my solitude. What I'd really love, I've decided, meandering the brownish,
wintering green, is for three fattened crows to attend my weedy gravesite. Ticklish
matter, questionable taste: I don't want my bones bleached, don't crave a clownish
ceremony, only need the world to strut dark, luminous-eyed, fierce-beaked
around me as I meld with layers of dust, Death's black wings surrounding me.
EIDERDOWN QUILT
I've never understood it: the desire for evasion. A child,
I strode imperiously through my universe. I've been told it's a secret
of genius, and I believe it. Van Gogh, cowardly in the throes of a wilder
epilepsy, might well have fantasized about seizing that severed ear,
tossing it into the ocean, sharks consuming the fist-sized ball of flesh
with a bloody exhilaration. And if Toulouse-Lautrec
had wanted to hurl himself downstairs, smash his crippled skeleton
to bones, he could have. Art-fragments everywhere. Amusing himself
with a whore simply more appropriate. Redemption in claustrophia what artists
understand. Not valuing the world's blackened mindset, they delve inward,
seek out primary colors, the sexual ceruleans, vermilions, of the self. Wrapping
myself in an eiderdown quilt, I prepare not for sleep but for hibernation, dipping
into my psyche until my canvas rises bleached. At night, loving myself
with both hands, it's my energy I celebrate, raw twistedness its epiphany.
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Poetry from The Literary Review