must evolve because you, you
Take all that I have eaten as gold.
You are a vial of mercury swinging
Like hips at a cocktail bar.
I hold your heads,
Your limbs, soft absences
Whose screeches
I will never know.
I am the hanged woman.
My shame rushes to your future.
A Birthday Present
The light on the coldest night of the year is glacial.
The sea has frozen and slid across the mountains
Right into the centre of our nine hundred square feet
Where nothing grows. When Gertrude Stein was a small
Girl she kept hearing a sound she described as nails
Striking stone.
Years later she realized this was Emily Dickinson
Writing and she took up the axe.
Now I watch the twins swish in unison.
The poems on their steel rails go each
According to need. A rogue poem like a wave
In a white woollen poncho,
Its fringes a soft broom sweeping down the hall, out
Into the evening traffic, which hisses
Like a fire that might bring you ease.
Daddy
I feel all the daddies, Sylvia. They brawl inside me like drunken Colossi, elbowing my aorta, kicking my uterus. I hear you wrestling with them too, trying to keep down that one toe, big as a Frisco seal. They rise up again in bean green over blue. I always heard that line as a choke of rage, now I hear you choking back disbelief, then laughing as they turn and turn. Laugh if you will, in the end it was you who was through (or not through), you who coughed your life up into husband-daddy’s hands. Still, I envy your arriving at funny. I wish I could laugh when the hands that caught me at birth and later slit me in two like an apricot fly up at me in the middle of sex. Don’t complain, the brothers say, at least he showed interest. And that is true: if you’re going to defile one of your children, you might defile them all equally. Years later I returned to that hotel room and picked that fifteen-year-old girl up off the floor. What a fool, I thought, so weak, so trusting: my vulnerability repelled. I had no love for it. It was her or me and I wanted to live, Sylvia, so I stuck a dagger in her then, and I said, We’re through. She cried out as if I had killed her. I said, Surely you’re overstating harm. Surely you can do with a gash or two, a lost limb, a cunt that drags – how greedy you are to want to be whole. You see how inside out I was? So, Daddy, I had to kill you too. I didn’t need a knife for you. I made a guillotine of my mind and let it drop. In a blink you were gone. And then you were really gone: the black boot of your lung had rotted from the inside out, and when the surgeon pierced bone, a small Nagasaki was unleashed. But even death did not kill you. You followed me for years, a man in a clean white van, offering me sweet things if I went for a ride. You haunted me with such a look of incomprehension. Didn’t know me, or that you weren’t through, or why. You turned and turned like an injured bird. I have tried so hard to kill not you exactly – more the you that you left inside of me, Daddy. You once confessed you missed the war, Hitler, the resistance: you said it was the last time you were certain who the enemy was. This is why they stone haunted women. They have to kill them hard to get all the ghosts.
Mummy
after Louise Glück’s ‘Vita Nova’
You created me, you should remember me; you leaned your face into the canto of my birth, broke air with me, breathed your best, your unrest, into me, even as you bled, and my father caught me as an eagle takes a trout.
It was a rave, Mother, a real wave and blue, a sprig of fur, the three of us in our first pas de trois. You chewed the cord as he yanked. Before that I was locked in the dashboard with Patsy Cline while you two hurled and ducked and fucked.
You bore me; you should recall the blood you gave me, the bruises, how you breathed your discontent, your troubling, joyous, mysterious, mean, unquenchable thirst for life in me: you shock of blond, rare as Marilyn, a nubbly shudder of hose
and almond nougat, an edible parchment, a scroll so naive, with such fine print, so in love with your melancholy sex, you slept neatly in Technicolor, confident as a cat. You bore me, Mummy. You with your complicated luck. You should not desert me here,
not now, you should not forsake me at the lip of the mirror where the ego piques, at fifty, or fifty-one. You bathed in ice when menopause came, do you recall? You might have lived, you might have let go of history, made of sorrow a sail,
not a shroud to suffocate your Viking bones, wide and still as glaciers, your thin arms reaching out for Valium, Ativan, Ambien. You gave into yourself my Garbo, my tremolo, my Jeanne d’Arc, my dragon breather, mother, warrior, pursuer,
giver and taker of dreams, you saved me, and then you left me, don’t you recall? Don’t you remember your long arms slipping into the womb, not wanting that first painful separation, how you clung to me even before I was breath, before I was open, my mother,
my love, my jailer, your long nails like claws raking around my ears, clamping my eyes closed. You saved me. Wasn’t it that? Wrenched me into the world as you would pull an arrow from your back and use it to pick your teeth? You saved me, you should remember
me, my two moles, my wracked brow, my fingers, the flat, the round, my nails, more my father’s, like impish insect wings curled, too soft to pull your hairs, grey, my mother, myself, you said you would live for me, you said I would live for you,
to you, in you, you said, Tuck me into your pocket and walk me like a giraffe into Manhattan, just as you tucked me in your bag when you ran to and from him. You saved me, you should know me here with my upturned yes,
without a peony to my name. I come for you on my knees, slither to you on my belly: I am so sorry I couldn’t take you. I come still, digging for you to find my head once again, to set me right. To let me go, damn you, let me go.
Fever 103
I was born with a fever. It burned through the first
Six years of my life, burned scarlet, burned all night,
Burned as my mother held me upside down
To the light, jammed two fingers down my throat,
Tossed me up, casting me like a kite. I was thin, lumps
