Becoming Light (9 page)

Books with rice-paper pastings

Books with book fungus blooming over their pages

Books with pages of skin with flesh-colored bindings

Books by men in love with the letter O

Books which smell of earth whose pages turn

1

Evidence of life:

snapshots,

hundreds of split-seconds

when the eyes glazed over,

the hair stopped its growing,

the nails froze in fingertips,

the blood hung suspended

in its vessels—

while the small bloodships,

the red & white bloodboats

buoyed up & down at anchor

like the toys

of millionaires….

Evidence of life:

a split-second’s death

to live forever

in something called

a print.

A paparazzo life:

I shoot therefore I am.

2

Why does life need evidence

of life?

We disbelieve it

even as we live.

The bloodboats gently rocking,

the skull opening every night

to dreams more vivid than itself,

more solid

than its own bones,

the brain flowering with petals,

stamens, pistils,

magical fruit

which reproduces

from its own juice,

which invents

its own mouth,

& makes itself anew

each night.

3

Evidence of life?

My dreams.

The dreams which I write down.

The dreams which I relate

each morning with a solemn face

inventing as I go.

Evidence of life:

that we could meet for the first time,

open our scars & stitches to each other,

weave our legs around

each other’s patchwork dreams

& try to salve each other’s wounds

with love—

if it was love.

(I am not sure at all

if love is salve

or just

a deeper kind of wound.

I do not think it matters.)

If it was lust or hunger

& not love,

if it was all that they accused us of

(that we accused ourselves)—

I do not think it matters.

4

Evidence of love?

I imagine our two heads

sliced open like grapefruits,

pressed each half to half

& mingling acid juice

in search of sweet.

I imagine all my dreams

sliding out into your open skull—

as if I were the poet,

you the reader.

I imagine all your dreams

pressed against my belly

like your sperm

& singing into me.

I imagine my two hands

cupped around your life

& stroking it.

I imagine your two hands

making whirlpools

in my blood,

then quelling them.

5

I have no photograph of you.

At times I hardly can believe in you.

Except this ache,

this longing in my gut,

this emptiness which theorizes you

because if there is emptiness this deep,

there must be fullness somewhere.

My other half!

My life beyond this half-life!

Is life a wound

which dreams of being healed?

Is love a wound which deepens

as it dreams?

Do you exist?

Evidence:

these poems in which

I have been conjuring you,

this book which makes your absence palpable,

these longings printed black.

I am exposed.

I am a print of darkness

on a square of film.

I am a garbled dream

told by a breakfast-table liar.

I am a wound which has forgotten how to heal.

6

& if it wasn’t love,

if you called me now

across the old echo chamber of the ocean

& said:

“Look, I never loved you,”

I would feel

a little like a fool perhaps,

& yet it wouldn’t matter.

My business is to always feel

a little like a fool

& speak of it.

& I am sure

that when we love

we are better than ourselves

& when we hate,

worse.

& even if we call it madness later

& scrawl four-letter words

across those outhouse walls

we call our skulls—

we stand revealed

by those sudden moments

when we come together.

7

Evidence?

Or was it just my dream

waltzing with your dream?

My nightmare kissing yours?

When I awakened

did I walk with Jacob’s limp?

Did I sing a different song?

Did I find the inside of my palm

scarred as if

(for moments) it held fire?

Did my blood flow as riverwater flows

around a tree stump—

crooked, with a lilt?

What other evidence

did I need?

For Aaron Asher

1        Beware of the man who denounces ambition;

his fingers itch under his gloves.

2        Beware of the man who denounces war

through clenched teeth.

3        Beware of the man who denounces women writers;

his penis is tiny & cannot spell.

4        Beware of the man who wants to protect you;

he will protect you from everything but himself.

5        Beware of the man who loves to cook;

he will fill your kitchen with greasy pots.

6        Beware of the man who loves your soul;

he is a bullshitter.

7        Beware of the man who denounces his mother;

he is a son of a bitch.

8        Beware of the man who spells son of a bitch as one word;

he is a hack.

9        Beware of the man who loves death too well;

he is taking out insurance.

10      Beware of the man who loves life too well;

he is a fool.

11      Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists;

he is afraid.

12      Beware of the man who trusts psychiatrists;

he is in hock.

13      Beware of the man who picks your dresses;

he wants to wear them.

14      Beware of the man you think is harmless;

he will surprise you.

15      Beware of the man who cares for nothing but books;

he will run like a trickle of ink.

16      Beware of the man who writes flowery love letters;

he is preparing for years of silence.

17      Beware of the man who praises liberated women;

he is planning to quit his job.

Eggs boiling in a pot.

They click

like castanets.

I put one in a cup

& slice its head off.

Under the wobbly egg white

is my first husband.

Look how small he’s grown

since last we met!

“Eat me,” he says agreeably.

I hesitate, then bite.

The thick yolk runs down

my thighs.

I take another egg

& slice its head.

Inside is my second husband.

This one’s better done.

“You liked the white,” I say,

“I liked the yolk.”

He doesn’t speak

but scowls as if to say:

“Everyone always eats me

in the end.”

I chew him up

but I spit out

his jet-black hair,

the porcelain jackets from his teeth,

his cufflinks, fillings,

eyeglass frames….

I drink my coffee

& I read the Times.

Another egg is boiling in the pot.

Endless duplication of lives and objects…

—Theodore Roethke

I have known the imperial power of secretaries,

the awesome indifference of receptionists,

I have been intimidated by desk & typewriter,

by the silver jaws of the stapler

& the lecherous kiss of the mucilage,

& the unctuousness of rubber cement

before it dries.

I have been afraid of telephones,

have put my mouth to their stale tobacco breath,

have been jarred to terror

by their jangling midnight music,

& their sudden blackness

even when they are white.

I have been afraid in elevators

amid the satin hiss of cables

& the silky lisping of air conditioners

& the helicopter blades of fans.

I have seen time killed in the office jungles

of undeclared war.

My fear has crept into the paper guillotine

& voyaged to the Arctic Circle of the water cooler.

My fear has followed me into the locked Ladies Room,

& down the iron fire stairs

to the postage meter.

I have seen the mailroom women like lost letters

frayed around the edges.

I have seen the Xerox room men

shuffling in & out among each other

like cards in identical decks.

I have come to tell you I have survived.

I bring you chains of paperclips instead of emeralds.

I bring you lottery tickets instead of poems.

I bring you mucilage instead of love.

I lay my body out before you on the desk.

I spread my hair amid a maze of rubber stamps.

RUSH. SPECIAL DELIVERY. DO NOT BEND
.

I am open—will you lick me like an envelope?

I am bleeding—will you kiss my paper cuts?

(In Memoriam Marina Tsvetayeva, Anna Wickham, Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare’s sister, etc., etc.)

The best slave

does not need to be beaten.

She beats herself.

Not with a leather whip,

or with stick or twigs,

not with a blackjack

or a billyclub,

but with the fine whip

of her own tongue

& the subtle beating

of her mind

against her mind.

For who can hate her half so well

as she hates herself?

& who can match the finesse

of her self-abuse?

Years of training

are required for this.

Twenty years

of subtle self-indulgence,

self-denial;

until the subject

thinks herself a queen

& yet a beggar—

both at the same time.

She must doubt herself

in everything but love.

She must choose passionately

& badly.

She must feel lost as a dog

without her master.

She must refer all moral questions

to her mirror.

She must fall in love with a Cossack

or a poet.

She must never go out of the house

unless veiled in paint.

She must wear tight shoes

so she always remembers her bondage.

She must never forget

she is rooted in the ground.

Though she is quick to learn

& admittedly clever,

her natural doubt of herself

should make her so weak

that she dabbles brilliantly

in half a dozen talents

& thus embellishes

but does not change

our life.

If she’s an artist

& comes close to genius,

the very fact of her gift

should cause her such pain

that she will take her own life

rather than best us.

& after she dies, we will cry

& make her a saint.

Ash falls on the roof

of my house.

I have cursed you enough

in the lines of my poems

& between them,

in the silences which fall

like ash-flakes

on the watertank

from a smog-bound sky.

I have cursed you

because I remember

the smell of
Joy

on a sealskin coat

& because I feel

more abandoned than a baby seal

on an ice floe red

with its mother’s blood.

I have cursed you

as I walked & prayed

on a concrete terrace

high above the street

because whatever I pulled down

with my bruised hand

from the bruising sky,

whatever lovely plum

came to my mouth

you envied

& spat out.

Because you saw me in your image,

because you favored me,

you punished me.

It was only a form of you

my poems were seeking.

Neither of us knew.

For years

we lived together in a single skin.

We shared fur coats.

We hated each other

as the soul hates the body

for being weak,

as the mind hates the stomach

for needing food,

as one lover hates the other.

I kicked

in the pouch of your theories

like a baby kangaroo.

I believed you

on Marx, on Darwin,

on Tolstoy & Shaw.

I said I loved Pushkin

(you loved him).

I vowed Monet

was better than Bosch.

Who cared?

I would have said nonsense

to please you

& frequently did.

This took the form,

of course,

of fighting you.

We fought so gorgeously!

We fought like one boxer

& his punching bag.

We fought like mismatched twins.

We fought like the secret sharer

& his shade.

Now we’re apart.

Time doesn’t heal

the baby to the womb.

Separateness is real

& keeps on growing.

One by one the mothers

drop away,

the lovers leave,

the babies outgrow clothes.

Some get insomnia—

the poet’s disease—

& sit up nights

nursing

at the nipples