Made in Detroit (8 page)

In the mirror an aura of sanctity.

Her husband will not love her

if she is not perfect, flat, hard

as a landing strip. His disapproval

frosts their bed and her blood.

He is the voice of the Puritan

father. He channels Cotton Mather

and dreams of burning native villages

full of naked sinners, of hanging

uppity women who mutter charms.

She reads the fine print on every

bottle, in every manual. Her

mattresses still sport their tags.

Life is a marathon that keeps

getting longer. Her nipples bleed.

The Puritan’s wife becomes a pillar

of rock, an obelisk pointing toward

the cold grey sky—a monument

commemorating a girl who tried

to grow into a woman but was pruned.

The morning of the day you died

the birds were singing backup

to a huge red sun

marching out of the green marsh.

Later as your breath was rasping

that sun now fiery white

beat on the blue gong of the sky

and the birds were silent.

The squash blossoms were opening

to warmth. A bumblebee zizzed

its way through the garden. A striped

caterpillar mounted the dill.

A robin ate it in two gulps. Later

a ruddy fox looked at me from

under the pitch pines, eyeing

the tabby in the window.

Everybody went about their daily

round, chasing and being chased,

flying, trotting, eating, eaten while

you were slowly swallowed

and we wept.

Sleep winds around me like a coy

snake, touching, squeezing, feinting

withdrawing. Tedious foreplay

never arriving at the act itself.

Or the absence of act: that place

I can let go of the day and allow

problems to fall like a tray of dishes

breaking, except that in the morning

every problem is seamlessly intact.

I’m a tightrope walker who longs

to let go, to dive into that sweet fog

below. Rise up, fog, and engulf me,

melt me into you. Let me cease

all the brain and body’s muttering,

the discontents of organ and joint.

Let me be Nobody—no body, no

mind nattering, no ambitions,

losses, bills, projects, obligations:

let nothing fill me like a deserted hall

where words no longer resonate.

I want to be emptied out, a purse

dumped on the table. Sleep, you

are the only room I long to enter

that moon of white silence.

The day was planned, birthday

of two friends, Indian food.

They had secured the ingredients

mail order two weeks before.

The day was preordered, time

to make the mango chutney, time

to wash the rice, to pound spices

in the mortar, soak chickpeas.

The police pounded on the door

at six a.m., sent the couple

and their dog into exile from

a crime scene: a nude woman

facedown in their tenant’s

hot tub. No, they had heard

nothing. The dog had not barked,

he slept with them. A quiet night.

Our ordered days can crack open

like an egg dropped on the floor,

its contents leaking out

in a sticky yellow mess.

A woman they had never met

dying on their land, who knew

how or why, the tub itself

now a grisly souvenir,

the police busy with questions

they couldn’t begin to answer—

and the one we all ask, why

me? why us? why today?

Sometimes I think I am a fiction

and only memories strung together

hold my life to some coherence.

If all my lovers stood in a line

what commonality would I see

except luck good and bad,

except need and accident,

desperation like a bad cough

recurring to convulse my body.

If all the clothes I wore were strung

on a blocklong clothesline, I’d see

not decoration but roles, all

in a row, selves slipped into, now

too tight, too loose, too short.

Discarded for a new foray.

But if my cats were lined up

I’d know exactly how I loved each

their games, their habits, how

they lived with me and died

leaving me. If all the edicts

I put forth, manifestos, diatribes,

all those didactic moments came

swarming, I’d duck and run. I

was so sure. Then not. Then not

at all. Yet I go stumbling on

bearing my nametag still wonder-

ing how I came to get here.

Cold water dripping

on granite with patience makes

a deep enough hole.

Wild red poppies blanketed the hills.

As I perched on a sun warmed rock

I felt breath on my neck. A half-grown

goat looked into my eyes with her

knowing yellow gaze, nibbled my collar.

I had climbed halfway up a mountain

and the sun stuck to my black hair

a too heavy helmet. In the distance,

small bells jangled. The cry of a circling

hawk sliced the air like a scimitar.

Bits of marble were jumbled around me,

some unknown unnamed ruin that people

once had cared enough to build, hauling

pale blocks up a steeply angled slope.

Temple, I wondered, to what kind of god?

A god of goats, the yellow eyes suggested.

She bleated for emphasis. A dancing creature

horned and horny, celebrated with food

and orgy, worshippers leaping and turning,

feet pounding the ground, the feet that started

poetry going forward one beat at a time.

I had no wine, so I poured a little sip

from my canteen on the ground and bent

my head in homage to what had been

sacred and in my mind, still was.

It was a taut time, bitter and bitten.

I lived part of the time with a man

I had married but who had pried

open the marriage years before

so he could chase the young

and easy girls sprouting around us.

I thought of you as I cooked, burning

liver. I thought of you as I bathed

my otherwise untouched body

gleaming underwater as if I swam

in tears. I thought of you and I

felt a hot acid pain in my gut.

Longing ripped through me

making new roads of absence.

My desire was a strange creature

that lived in my chest and ate

at me with its ferocious teeth.

I thought we could never

really be a couple, because

I was trapped in his plots

and needs and secret angers

like snakes under the floorboards.

I was alone in a crowded house

wallpapered with rancid blame.

I could see no doors, only

windows in which you wandered

just in the range of my sight.

In the cage of my gone-bad

marriage I turned my gerbil

wheel of despair ever faster.

I carried my love for you hidden

like cash stuffed into a bra.

Cooking, cleaning, sitting with

friends, I was secretly absent,

my inner attention cocooned

around your face.

I called myself idiot. Fan-

tasy was a drug; I was its

addict, rushing to consume

it every moment. I dreamed

the impossible escape

to your bed.

It was like a song I couldn’t

keep from taking over

my brain where it repeated

repeated repeated. Stupefied

with desire, nothing I did

was quite real.

Only those moments we stole

before planes, in the woods,

while he went off with girl

friends or buddies, that

was my true and only life

until it was.

Some people move through your life

like the perfume of peonies, heavy

and sensual and lingering.

Some people move through your life

like the sweet musky scent of cosmos

so delicate if you sniff twice, it’s gone.

Some people occupy your life

like moving men who cart off

couches, pianos and break dishes.

Some people touch you so lightly you

are not sure it happened. Others leave

you flat with footprints on your chest.

Some are like those fall warblers

you can’t tell from each other even

though you search Petersen’s.

Some come down hard on you like

a striking falcon and the scars remain

and you are forever wary of the sky.

We all are waiting rooms at bus

stations where hundreds have passed

through unnoticed and others

have almost burned us down

and others have left us clean and new

and others have just moved in.

What marks does a marriage leave

when one of them has gone

into another entanglement?

A bottle of wine chosen, forgotten.

A old cat dying slowly of kidney

failure. Some books no longer

valued, music of another decade

they used to dance to, back

when dancing was together.

A green wool sweater abandoned

in the corner of a closet. Railroad

tie steps they buried in the hillside.

Trees they planted now taller

than the house. A mask, a wooden

necklace from foreign travels.

Pain drying up like a pond dying

from the edges but still deep

enough in the center to drown.

We rented an apartment on Putnam

and Pearl at a stop sign where music

blared from cars all night boasting

their taste before they gunned away.

The top floor under the flat tar roof

was sodden with heat. Next door

on the steps of the halfway house

men drank from paper bags.

Always some dog was barking

like a saw cutting into rough wood.

Sirens blasted tunnels in thick

air and below, someone cursed.

Oddly, we were happy there,

our love still moist and sticky

a mousse that had not quite jelled

but sweet with ripe strawberries.

You came home at two reeking

of smoke and garlic, high from

restaurant drugs and afterwork

drinks with kitchen crews.

I banged away on my Olympia

typewriter, trying to pay off

debts from my bloody divorce.

We were growing into each

other, tentative roots like fragile

tentacles exploring the other’s

body and brain. By the time we

moved, we’d knotted to a couple.

Breakage. Yes, splinters, the shards

pierce my brain. In each friendship,

a new self grows different from any

other of the selves we make and unmake.

In every love however small as marbles

children roll in their palms and stare into,

we become. In the big ones, our faces

change and never quite resume.

So a piece tears off after the final

quarrel, after the argument that burned

the night to cinders and a wind of grey

ashes, after the wind has dispersed

even the last smear of ash and nothing

nothing at all stays but a friendship

whose dead weight hangs from your

neck like the sailor’s albatross, quite

murdered but still of sufficient weight

to bend your back. Your neck hurts.

Words clot in your throat like blood.

A lot of you hurts. Pain grabs attention

but is boring as it spikes and drones

on and on.
Shut up
you scream at it

at three a.m. But in the end months

years pass and you forget. Almost.