Becoming Light (12 page)

the manner of your death

the way I might have once

revised your poem.

You are like nobody

since I love you,

& you are gone.

♦

Can you believe

your death gave birth to me?

Live or die,

you said insistently.

You chose the second

& the first chose me.

I mourned you

& I found him

in one week.

♦

Is love the sugar-coated poison

that gets us in the end?

We spoke of men

as often as of poems.

We tried to legislate away

the need for love—

that backseat fuck

& death caressing you.

♦

Why did you do it

in your mother’s coat?

(I know

but also know

I have to ask.)

Our mothers get us hooked,

then leave us cold,

all full-grown orphans

hungering after love.

♦

You loved a man who spoke

“like greeting cards.”

“He fucks me well

but I can’t talk to him.”

We shared that awful need

to talk in bed.

Love wasn’t love

if we could only speak

in tongues.

♦

& the intensity of unlove

increased

until the motor, the running motor

could no longer power

the driver,

& you, with miles to go,

would rather sleep.

♦

Between the pills, the suicide pills

& our giggly vodkas in the Algonquin…

Between your round granny glasses

& your eyes blue as glaciers…

Between your stark mother-hunger

& your mother courage,

you knew there was only one poem

we all were writing.

♦

No competition.

“The poem belongs to everyone

& God.”

I jumped out of your

suicide car

& into his arms.

Your death was mine.

I ate it

& returned.

♦

Now I sit by a lake

writing to you.

I love a man

who makes my fingers ache.

I type to you

off somewhere in the clouds.

I tap the table

like a spiritualist.

♦

Sex is a part of death;

that much I know.

Your voice was earth,

your eyes were glacier-blue.

Your slender torso

& long-stemmed American legs

drape across

this huge blue western sky.

♦

I want to tell you “Wait,

don’t do it yet.”

Love is the poison, Anne,

but love eats death.

ever since our lunch of cheese

& moonjuice

on the far side of the sun,

I have walked the craters of New York,

a trail of slime

ribboning between my legs,

a phosphorescent banner

which is tied to you,

a beam of moonlight

focused on your navel,

a silver chain

from which my body dangles,

& my whole torso chiming

like sleighbells in a Russian novel.

Dearest man-in-the moon,

I used to fear moonlight

thinking her my mother.

I used to dread nights

when the moon was full.

I used to scream

“Pull down the shade!”

because the moonface leered at me,

because I felt her mocking,

because my fear lived in me

like rats in a wheel of cheese.

You have eaten out my fear.

You have licked

the creamy inside of my moon.

You have kissed

the final crescent of my heart

& made it full.

For Howard Moss

Already six years past your age!

The steps in Rome,

the house near Hampstead Heath,

& all your fears

that you might cease to be

before your pen had glean’d….

My dear dead friend,

you were the first to teach me

how the dust could sing.

I followed in your footsteps

up the Heath.

I listened hard

for Lethe’s nightingale.

& now at 31, I want to live.

Oblivion holds no adolescent charms.

& all the “souls of poets

dead & gone,”

& all the “Bards

of Passion & Mirth”

cannot make death—

its echo, its damp earth—

resemble birth.

♦

You died in Rome—

in faltering sunlight—

Bernini’s watery boat still sinking

in the fountain in the square below.

When Severn came to say

the roses bloomed,

you did not “glut thy sorrow,”

but you wept—

you wept for them

& for your posthumous life.

& yet we all lead posthumous lives somehow.

The broken lyre,

the broken lung,

the broken love.

Our names are writ in newsprint

if not water.

“Don’t breathe on me—” you cried,

“it comes like ice.”

♦

Last words.

(I can’t imagine mine.

Perhaps some muttered dream,

some poem, some curse.)

Three months past 25,

you lived on milk.

They reeled you backward

in the womb of love.

♦

A tepid February Roman Spring.

Fruit trees in bloom

& Hampstead still in snow

& Fanny Brawnereceives a hopeful note

when you are two weeks dead.

A poet’s life:

always awaiting mail.

♦

For God’s sake

kick against the pricks!

There aren’t very many roses.

Your life was like an hourglass

with no sand.

The words slid through

& rested under glass;

the flesh decayed

to moist Italian clay.

♦

At autopsy,

your lungs were wholly gone.

Was that from too much singing?

Too many rifts of ore?

You spent your life breath

breathing life in words.

But words return no breath

to those who write.

Letters, Life, & Literary Remains…

“I find that I cannot exist without poetry….”

“O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”

“What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth….”

“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us….”

“Sancho will invent a Journey heavenwards as well as anybody….”

“Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul.”

“Why should we kick against the Pricks when we can walk on Roses?”

“Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses….”

“Until we are sick, we understand not….”

“Sorrow is Wisdom….”

“Wisdom is folly….”

♦

Too wise

& yet not wise enough

at 25.

Sick, you understood

& understanding

were too weak to write.

Proved on the pulse: poetry.

If sorrow is wisdom

& wisdom is folly

then too much sorrow

is folly.

I find that I cannot exist without sorrow

& I find that sorrow

cannot exist without poetry….

What the imagination seizes as beauty

must be poetry….

What the imagination seizes must be…

♦

You claimed no lust for fame

& yet you burned.

“The faint conceptions I have of poems to come brings

the blood frequently into my forehead.”

I burn like you

until it often seems

my blood will break

the boundaries of my brain

& issue forth in one tall fountain

from my skull.

♦

A spume of blood from the forehead: poetry.

A plume of blood from the heart: poetry.

Blood from the lungs: alizarin crimson words.

♦

“I will not spoil my love of gloom

by writing an Ode to Darkness….”

The blood turns dark;

it stiffens on the sheet.

At night the childhood walls

are streaked with blood—

until the darkness seems awash with red

& children sleep behind two blood-branched lids.

♦

“My imagination is a monastery

& I am its monk…”

At five & twenty,

very far from home,

death picked you up

& sorted to a pip.

& 15 decades later,

your words breathe:

syllables of blood.

A strange transfusion

for my feverish verse.

I suck your breath,

your rhythms & your blood,

& all my fiercest dreams are sighed away.

I send you love,

dear Keats,

I send you peace.

Since flesh can’t stay

we keep the breath aloft.

Since flesh can’t stay,

we pass the words along.

For Jennifer Josephy

On cold days

it is easy to be reasonable,

to button the mouth against kisses,

dust the breasts

with talcum powder

& forget

the red pulp meat

of the heart.

On those days

it beats

like a digital clock—

not a beat at all

but a steady whirring

chilly as green neon,

luminous as numerals in the dark,

cool as electricity.

& I think:

I can live without it all—

love with its blood pump,

sex with its messy hungers,

men with their peacock strutting,

their silly sexual baggage,

their wet tongues in my ear

& their words like little sugar suckers

with sour centers.

On such days

I am zipped in my body suit,

I am wearing seven league red suede boots,

I am marching over the cobblestones

as if they were the heads of men,

& I am happy

as a seven-year-old virgin

holding Daddy’s hand.

Don’t touch.

Don’t try to tempt me with your ripe persimmons.

Don’t threaten me with your volcano.

The sky is clearer when I’m not in heat,

& the poems

are colder.

…who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

—Virginia Woolf

Every month,

the reminder of emptiness

so that you are tuned

to your bodyharp,

strung out on the harpsichord

of all your nerves

& hammered bloody blue

as the crushed fingers

of the woman pianist

beaten by her jealous lover.

Who was she?

Someone I invented

for this poem,

someone I imagined…

Never mind,

she is me, you—

tied to that bodybeat,

fainting on the rack of blood,

moving to the metronome—

empty, empty, empty.

No use.

The blood is thicker

than the roots of trees,

more persistent than my poetry,

more baroque than her bruised music.

It gilds the sky above the Virgin’s head.

It turns the lilies white.

Try to run:

the blood still follows you.

Swear off children,

seek a quiet room

to practice your preludes & fugues.

Under the piano,

the blood accumulates;

eventually it floats you both away.

Give in.

Babies cry & music is your life.

Darling, you were born to bleed

or rock.

& the heart breaks

either way.

I am the sphinx.

I am the woman buried in sand

up to her chin.

I am waiting for an archaeologist

to unearth me,

to dig out my neck & my nipples,

bare my claws

& solve my riddle.

No one has solved my riddle

since Oedipus.

♦

I face the pyramids which rise

like angular breasts

from the dry body of Egypt.

My fertile river is flowing down below—

a lovely lower kingdom.

Every woman should have a delta

with such rich silt—

brown as the buttocks

of Nubian queens.

♦

O friend, why have you come to Egypt?

Aton & Yahweh

are still feuding.

Moses is leading his people

& speaking of guilt.

The voice out of the volcano

will not be still.

♦

A religion of death,

a woman buried alive.

For thousands of years

the sand drifted over my head.

My sex was a desert,

my hair more porous than pumice,

& nobody sucked my lips

to make me tell.

♦

The pyramid breasts, though huge,

will never sag.

In the center of each one,

a king lies buried.

In the center of each one,

a darkened chamber…

a tunnel,

dead men’s bones,

malignant gold.

Because she wants to touch him,

she moves away.

Because she wants to talk to him,

she keeps silent.

Because she wants to kiss him,

she turns away

& kisses a man she does not want to kiss.

He watches

thinking she does not want him.

He listens

hearing her silence.

He turns away

thinking her distant

& kisses a girl he does not want to kiss.

They marry each other—

a four-way mistake.

He goes to bed with his wife

thinking of her.

She goes to bed with her husband

thinking of him.

— & all this in a real old-fashioned four-poster bed.