I'm not a war baby. I'm a baby at war.
We leave, hands empty, because you are no one.
Your hand is the outrageous redeemer.
My safe, safe psychosis is broken. It is hard. It was made of stone. It covered my
face like a mask. But it has cracked.
I know a little bit about a lot of things, but I don't know enough about you. . .
I called him Comfort. I gave him the wrong name.
What has it come to, that I should defy you? I would be a copper wire without electricity.
I would be a Beacon Hill dowager without her hat. I would be a surgeon who cut his own nails. I
would be a glutton who threw away his spoon. I would be God without Jesus to speak for me.
Let her bend her head sadly now and then, for sometimes her palm will read He loves me
not.
But not always.
I could not define her, I could not name her mood, her locked-up faces. She should be put
on like one's first or last cloth.
They remove my shadow, my phantom from my past.
Perhaps, I was born kneeling, born expecting a kiss of mercy. By two or three, I learned
not to kneel, not to expect, to plant my fires underground, where none but the dolls, perfect and
awful, could be whispered to or laid down to die.
Now, that I have written many words, and let out so many loves for so many, and been altogether
what I always was - a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless. Do I not
look in the mirror these days and see a drunken rat avert her eyes? Do I not feel the hunger
acutely, that I would rather die than look into its face?
I kneel once more, in case mercy should come in the nick of time.
I'll work nights. I'll dance in the city. I'll wear red for a burning. I'll look at the
Charles very carefully, wearing its long legs of neon. And the cars will go by. The cars will
go by. And there'll be no scream from the lady in the red dress, dancing on her own Ellis Island,
who turns in circles, dancing alone as the cars go by.
If all this can be true, then why I am in a country of black mud?
The rock that resists the crowbar gives way to the roots of the tender plant.
To me, to my mother, it was poison, the poison was all of me.
He who lives on, lives on, like the wings of an Atlantic seagull. Though he has stopped
flying, the wings go on flapping, despite it all, despite it all.
I have been born many times, a false Messiah, but let me be born again into something true.
The soul was not cured, it was as full as a clothes closet of dresses that did not fit.
Perhaps, I am becoming unhuman and should accept its natural order? Perhaps, I am becoming
part of the green world, and maybe a rose will just pop out of my mouth? Oh passerby, let me bite
it off and spit it at you so you can say, "How nice!" and nod your thanks and walk three blocks
to your lady love, and she will stick it behind her ear, not knowing it will crawl into her ear,
her brain, and drive her mad.
I say now, you gave what you could.
They both die like waves breaking over me, and I am drowning a little, but always swimming.
The finger is scared, but it keeps its long numb place. And I keep dancing, a sort of
waltz, clicking the two rings, all of a life at its last cough, as I swim through the air of the
kitchen, and the same radio plays its songs and I make a small path through them, with my bare
finger and my funny feet, doing the undoing dance, letting my history rip itself off me, and
stepping into something unknown and transparent, but all ten fingers stretched outward, flesh
extended as metal waiting for a magnet.
I hold up my hand and see only nails.
A strangler needs my throat, the daughter has ceased to eat anything, the wife speaks of
this, but only the ice cubes listen.
I feel I must learn to speak the Baa of the simple-minded while my mind dives into
the multi-colored, crowded voices' cries for help. Yes! While my mind plays simple-minded,
plays dead-woman in neon, I must recall to say Baa to the black sheep I am. Baa.
Baa. Baa.
They are not Gods, though they would like to be; they are only human trying to fix up a
human. Many humans die. They die like tender, palpitating berries in November. But all along
the doctors remember: First, do no harm. They would kiss if it would heal. It would not heal.
When you see them, tell them I am still here, that I stand on one leg while the other one
dreams, that this is the only way, that the lies I tell them are different from the lies I tell
myself, that by being both here and beyond I am becoming a horizon, that as the sun rises and
sets, I know my place, that breath is what saves me. That breath is the beginning again, that
from it all resistance falls away, as meaning falls away from life, or darkness falls from light,
that breath is what I give them when I send my love.
We have done what we wanted. We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry of
each other, and we have welcomed grief and called ruin the impossible habit to break. Coming to
this has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away. We have no heart or saving
grace, no place to go, no reason to remain.
You stand at the window. There is a glass cloud in the shape of a heart. The wind's sighs
are like caves in your speech. You are the ghost in the tree outside. The street is quiet. The
weather, like tomorrow, like your life, is partially here, partially up in the air. There is
nothing you can do. The good life gives no warning. It weathers the climates of despair and
appears, on foot, unrecognized, offering nothing, and you are there.
While the light shines, what else can we do? And who doesn't have one foot in the grave?
And which one of us is not being pulled down constantly? I see myself dancing. I smile at
everybody. Slowly, I dance out of the burning house of my head. And who isnt' borne again and
again into heaven?
Your best friend is gone, your other friend, too. Now the dream that used to turn in your
sleep, sails into the year's coldest night. What did you say? Or was it something you did? It
makes no difference - the house of breath collapsing around your voice, your voice burning, are
nothing to worry about. Tomorrow your friends will come back; your moist open mouth will bloom
in the glass of storefronts. Yes. Yes. Tomorrrow they will come back and you will invent an
ending that comes out right.
It is an old story, the way it happens, sometimes in winter, sometimes not. The listener
falls to sleep, the doors to the closets of his unhappiness open and into his room the misfortunes
come - death by daybreak, death by nightfall, their wooden wings bruising the air, their shadows
the spilled milk the world cries over. There is need for surprise endings; the green field where
cows burn like newsprint, where the farmer sits and stares, where nothing, when it happens, is
never terrible enough.
I am always amazed at how easily satisfied some people are.
The mirror was nothing without you.
You drift in a pool of silver air, where sounds and dreams of wounds rise from the deep
humus of sleep, to bloom like flowers against the glass. I look at you and see myself under the
surface. A dark and private weather settles down on everything. It is colder and the dreams
wither away. You stand like a shade in the painless glass, frail, distant, older than ever. It
will always be this way. I stand here scared that you will disappear, scared that you will stay.
I turn to the window's cracked pane streaked with rain. Where have I been?
I drift. I shiver. I know that soon the day will come to wash away the moon's white
stain, that I shall walk in the morning sun, invisible as anyone.
Poor child! I look into the brown mirror of her eyes and see myself diminishing, sinking
down to a depth she does not know is there. Out of breath, I will not rise again. I grow into
my death. My life is small and getting smaller. The world is green. Nothing is all.
Now, when I answer the phone, his lips are in the receiver; when I sleep, his hair is
gathered around a familiar face on the pillow; wherever I search, I find his feet. He is what
is left of my life.
Although I have tried to return, I have always ended here, where I am now.
His pursuit was a form of evasion: the more he tried to uncover, the more there was to
conceal, the less he understood. If he kept it up, he would lose everything. He knew this and
remembered what he could - always at a distance.
