To My Husband

At that wedding service, outdoors, the bridesmaids’
dresses midnight-eggplant, grosgrain,
satin shot with glints of maroon like
pheasant harvested, painted, and eaten,
the minister read Paul’s letter to the Corinthians,
describing you. After the service
your high-school sweetheart talked about you,
your steadfastness, your kindness. She met you
a month after your mother had died
on a distant island, and every Friday and
Saturday night you went dancing, the only
teenagers on some wooden floor in some
club, holding each other, turning,
1958, 1959 …
Then I understood, if it had been
half a generation later
you would have been lovers, you would have married
and been happy. Not as happy as we have been,
but happy. And I would be dead by now,
dead long since. My life has been based
on your goodness—I do not think two such, for me,
come along in a lifetime.
I would not have married, or I’d have married badly,
never had these children or written
these words. I’d have died on West 12th Street, that time,
making a bomb—badly—they would have
identified me by my little finger, my
mother sitting in the precinct, holding
my cocked pinky.

– 21 –

After My Mother Was Done With Me

After my mother was done with me,
after I would put my pants back on,
hairbrush scansion of punishment done,
I’d go back to my room, close the door,
and wander around, ending up
on the floor sometimes, always, near the baseboard,
where the vertical fall of the wall meets
the level rule of the floor—I would put
my face near that angle, and look at the dust
and anything caught in the dust.
I would see the swags of old-lady-hair dust,
pelmets carved on cenotaph granite,
and cocoons of dust like tiny Kotexes
wound and wound in toilet paper
with no one inside, child of the childless,
I would see the anonymous crowds of grit, as if
looking down into Piazza Navona
from a mile above Il Duce, I would see
a larval casing waisted in gold
thin as the poorest gold wedding band,
and a wasp’s dried thorax and legs wound love-ring
with a pubic hair—my mother’s, who slept
in my second bed the second half
of every second night. I would see
the coral-maroon of the ladybug’s back
dotted with its bad genes,
I would see a fly curled up, dried,
its wings like the rabbit’s ears, or the deer’s.
I would lie quiet and look at them,
it was so peaceful there with them,
I was not at all afraid of them,
and my sadness for them didn’t matter.
I would look at each piece of lint
and half imagine being it,
I would feel that I was looking at

– 22 –

the universe from a great distance.
Sometimes I’d pick up a Dresden fly
and fly it through the air, sometimes I’d idly play
house with the little world, weddings and
funerals with little body parts,
awful births, but I did not want
to disarrange that unerring deadness
like a kind of goodness, corner of wetless
grey waste, nothing anyone
would go for. Without desire, or rage, I would
watch that dust celestium as the pain on my
matter died and turned to spirit
and wandered the cloud world of home,
the ashes of the earth.

Poem to the Reader

Since I was thirteen, I have wondered who I am.
I’d look in the bathroom mirror, stare at that
homely handsome face—was I nice?
was I evil?—then squeeze the sebum out of my
pores, slow thick cold sebum.
Under my skin, female flesh
now lay in packs, hip-flasks of fat.
Out of my mouth came a soil-like smell.
Maybe I was actually dead,
maybe I was my father on the couch passed
out risen up and walking.
When I would touch a boy, I would feel like an archangel
crushed to another archangel,
between the curve of the dash and the hard
orbit of the seat, wings fiercely shut, we would fly.

– 23 –

I would look in the mirror afterwards, my
eyes shining. And when the head
appeared, and the child went one way
and my body another, it wasn’t good or
evil, it was just the animal,
the real. I sang when I tended the children,
day and night went back inside
the universe of the marriage bed, I felt
virtuous, stuffed to the spirit-tips with touch.
And then the children grew up, I was weaned from that
constant tending. I am nothing without
a body in my arms, I am a craving spirit,
the way the dead stream along the walls of
houses and affix themselves to the glowing windows.
The morning—the rain not dropping yet but
fizzing, gently boiling in the air—
I felt some word might be in, soon,
on who I am. And what if I am not loving?
What if all that buttoning and un-
buttoning and suckling and sucking were
the hunger of the dead. Sure I would die for them,
gladly give even my sight, my
hair to fire to save them, but isn’t that
easy for the dead, haven’t I always really
longed to give an arm for them, to
see the severed arms exchanged on the table.
Sex so obvious, the cunt wanting to
swallow, swallow, fiercely sing all
day all night bright come and his pleasure just
exciting, the great lover just an evil
fucker feeding on his pleasure, as if I
could not make
love, when none
had made me. Her milk she craved to give me
to get her nipple sucked, and the grave
man was finally only barely
able to stay in the suction path
of my beaming. Maybe some judge’s word

– 24 –

is in. Maybe when I entered the spoon
into the mouth, then lifted the handle as I
pulled, so the sphere of manna stayed in,
I was taking, maybe when I stroke his ass,
sated, press my face into the
cool nippleless breast of his buttock, I am
taking. The pubic hair on this sheet, in the
path of the lamp this morning, rears up,
its shadow’s tip clipped to either
end, its twin running in place
an illusory river—in torque, arched,
reddish, the poor animal hair,
mated to its shadow, is a soul in hell,
a poet bent over the paper. I lift my
head and look for you, to give you
this. But what if my giving is taking, if I
set the lips of this poem to your breast.
But what if you like that? If we’re all takers,
craving that gaze. So I set the mouth
of my iris to the mouth of your iris here
for this soul kiss.