One Secret Thing (5 page)

When I see them, my knees get a little weak.

I have to squat down close to them, I

want to put my face in one of them.

They are so buttery, and yet so clean.

They have a kind of soaking-wet dryness,

they have the tremulous chin, and the pair of

ocular petals, and the pair of frail

ear petals, the sweet dog face.

Or is it like the vulva of a woman,

or of some particular woman. My mother

tended them—purple-black—

when I kneel to them I am kneeling to my mother,

who quietly shows her body to me

whenever it can be done with the slightest pretense of dignity,

as if it might be a pleasure to me.

She’ll call to me, and when I come to her door

she’ll walk across her room slowly,

eyes focused in front of her feet

but the corners of her eyes alert. She is so lonely

since her husband died, she just wants to be

naked in a room with someone, anyone,

but her face has something eerie in its blankness,

the eyes kept rounded—I have no idea

what she is thinking, I get that nervous feeling

I’ve had all my life around my mother. But when I

see a bed of these, I kneel,

and gaze at each one, freshly and freshly wowed,

I love to run my thumb softly

over the gentle jaw, I would like

to wrap myself in a cloak of them,

a cloak of one if it were large enough.

I am tired of hating myself, tired

of loathing. I want to be carried in a petal

sling, sling of satin and cream,

I want to be dazed, I want the waking sleep.

I am one of the ones, here,

who did what I am said to have done.

Look to yourselves—I was conceived the month

you voted him in—look to the high

court which went for execution

and against abortion. You sentenced me

to this life lived out till tomorrow And all

those people I killed, they’d be with you now,

if you’d let me die before I breathed,

when my mother and father needed me to die.

Would it have seemed more American to you if it

could have been a more public demise,

like this, if there could have been televised crowds

chanting outside the clinic, the cervix

magnified, on a drive-in screen,

the fetus me six feet tall

strapped to the table? Not that I

have a say in this—not tonight,

and not at eight o’clock tomorrow

morning, when I will be one of the dead

at last—how you have made me work for it.

At first, I do not believe it, in the hotel

triple mirror, that that is my body, in

back, below the waist, and above

the legs—the thing that doesn’t stop moving

when I stop moving.

And it doesn’t look like just one thing,

or even one big, double thing

—even the word saddlebags has a

smooth, calfskin feel to it,

compared to this compendium

of net string bags shaking their booty of

cellulite fruits and nuts. Some lumps

look like bonbons translated intact

from chocolate box to buttocks, the curl on top

showing, slightly, through my skin. Once I see what I can

do with this, I do it, high-stepping

to make the rapids of my bottom rush

in ripples like a world wonder. Slowly,

I believe what I am seeing, a 54-year-old

rear end, once a tight end,

high and mighty, almost a chicken butt, now

exhausted, as if tragic. But this is not

an invasion, my cul-de-sac is not being

used to hatch alien cells, ball peens,

gyroscopes, sacks of marbles. It’s my hoard

of treasure, my good luck, not to be

dead, yet, though when I flutter

the wing of my ass again, and see,

in a clutch of eggs, each egg,

on its own, as if shell-less, shudder, I wonder

if anyone has ever died,

looking in a mirror, of horror. I think I will

not even catch a cold from it,

I will go to school to it, to Butt

Boot Camp, to the video store, where I saw,

in the window, my hero, my workout jelly

role model, my apotheosis:
Killer Buns.

When I ask my mother if she can remember

if my best friend, when I was nine,

died before, or after, her mother—

they had sprayed their tree with lead paint

in their closed garage—my mother describes

how furious my friend’s father was,

years later, when my mother and her second

husband beat him and his second wife

in the waltz contest. Her voice is melodious,

she loves to win, her rival’s loss

an erotic sweet. For a moment I see

it would not be an entirely bad thing

if my mother died. How interesting

to be in the world when she was not—how

odd to breathe air she would not recently

have breathed. I even envision her dead,

for a second—on her back, naked, like my father

small, my father as a woman, her mouth

open, as his was. Suddenly, I feel

not afraid—as if no one will hurt me.

And they’re together again, a moment—a bridal

pair of things, a tongs! As if they

delivered me like a message then were put to death.

They cannot unmake me. I can safely thank them

for my life. Thank you for my life.

When Edmund said he is going to Hawaii

I was back there, 14 and never been kissed,

and the young man I liked had asked me to go

for a walk that evening on the beach. And what filled

my mind, all day, were the arm-holes

of his short-sleeved bright-flowered cotton shirt, those

circles which seemed of the diameter

of a pie tin—how would my hands, reaching

to go around him as he began to hug me, not

slip, like burrow mammals, into

those openings, not go to ground?

And the man was, I was telling Edmund,

the man was, what is it called, biff,

boff—buff, Edmund said—

the young man was a lifeguard

and a surfer, on the hard dune of each breast a

nipple like a tiny scatter of sand,

bits of coral and starfish. And of course

my fear was desire, to pour, up,

into him, and into myself, and

swim, and strike together for the shore

—where we stood, later, in the late evening, and his

arms opened, and my arms opened,

and the origami closed itself

around the delicate, shut kiss.

And the air smelled of plumeria

and frangipangi—when the plane door

opens, you will smell it! And Edmund said,

You know what homosexuals

are called in China? Cut Sleeves—

when the emperor’s lover fell asleep

in his arms, and lay sleeping on the silk of the royal

robe, and the emperor had to get up,

he cut off the sleeve of his gown, so as not

to wake the young man, but leave him in the deeps of his dream.

Something wakes me, at my mother’s house,

in the dark. On the back of my hand, a luminous

wedge, a patch of Alamogordo—

the new-risen moon, the last quarter,

as if my mother, in her sleep, took

a ladle, and poured this portion. Now that

my mother loves me, I feel a little

cheated—who will be true, anymore,

to the years of drought? Whoever will

be true to them can thirst in good measure

under the glistening breast. There used to be no

choice, for her, she was a gurdy

of atoms swinging from each other’s elbows,

a force of hurdy wolvine cream,

and then, later, there was choice, she could dwell

on herself in bitterness, or dwell on

herself in hope. But sometimes, lately, there’s a

motion, diurnal—when drenched with attention

she might turn to me, with affection—that’s when I

feel that sore resentful rib.

They call the half moon the last

quarter, staying faithful to the back bulge,

to the edge between too little and too much,

the narrow calcium line neither roasting

nor freezing—as if one could make one’s home

on that border, if one could just keep moving,

nomad offspring of the stone opal

wanderer who is borne, singing,

across the night. My mother loves me

with a full, child’s heart. Here is my pleynt.

When they’d put her husband in the ambulance,

my mother stood beside it, looking into

its lighted window. It was midnight, the moon

like a larva high against the trunk

of the sequoia. The distant neighboring houses

were dark, the flowering shrubs dark,

I brought the car around, and she was

standing there, looking in that horizontal

picture window. I had never seen her so

still, yet she looked so alive, so vivid,

like a woman motionless at the moment of orgasm,

pure attention. She was glowing, slightly,

from the inner ambulance light, she seemed to

have no outside or inside, her surface

all depth,

every cell of her body was looking at him.

Doors slammed, I called to her, she

turned to me, like a scrimshaw Crusader

chess-piece rotated slowly on its base,

she called in response, melodious,

looking nowhere near me, she was

made of some other material,

wax or ivory or marble, she looked like

Homer ready to be led around the known globe.

On the phone my mother says she has been sorting

her late darling’s clothes—
and it BREAKS

my HEART
, and then there are soft sounds,

as if she’s been lowered down, into

a river of music.
I’m not unhappy
,

she says,
this is better for me than church
,

her voice through tears like the low singing

of a watered plant long not watered,

she lets me hear what she feels. I could be in a

cradle by the western shore of a sea, she could

be a young or an ancient mother.

Now I hear the melody

of the one bound to the mast. It had little

to do with me, her life, which lay

on my life, it was not really human life

but chemical, it was approximate landscape,

trenches and reaches, maybe it

was ordinary human life.

Now my mother sounds like me,

the way I sound to myself—one

who doesn’t know, who fails and hopes.

And I feel, now, that I had wanted never to stop blaming her,

like eating hard-shelled animals

at mid-molt. But now my mother

is like a tiny, shucked crier

in a tide pool beside my hand. I think

I had thought I would falter if I forgave my mother,

as if, then, I would lose her—and I do

feel lonely, now, to sense her beside me,

as if she is only a sister. And yet,

though I hear her sighs close by my ear,

my mother is in front of me somewhere, at a distance,

moving slowly toward the end of her life,

the shore of the eternal—she is solitary,

a woman alone, out ahead

of everyone I know, scout of the mortal, heart

breaking into solo.

On her first antidepressant, my mother

is adorable. Like many of us, she’s not

interested in much except herself, but these

days she’s more happily interested

in herself. Now I think of those years with her

as the Middle Ages, before morphine.

We could have just put something in her food!

like a
Rose Fairy Book
potion. Yes, I

wanted her to put me first, I wanted

to draw out

Leviathan

with an hook. But I sensed the one under

the one under the spell—
this
one,

the child who was in there to be tinkered down to.

She’s had her fitting for the MedicAlert,

“I’ve got it on, I’m all dingus’d up,

I knew you would want to know that I’m all

hooked up!” She is happy that I want to know,

and proud of wearing a little transmitter—not

unlike being an opera singer—

a link to those who wish her pleasure and long

life. Oh I have my mother on a leash.

Where wast thou, when I laid the foundations of the earth?

When the morning stars sang together?

I was there, with my mother.

How do they know that it won’t decide

to turn and come this way?!
my mother,

at 82, points out.
They think

they’re soooo clever, giving it that funny

name no one can remember, but how do they

know that whatever’s behind it wont suddenly

aim it at us? It’s big, I mean

It’s Oh-ho-HO!
I see, I said,

yes … You think someone’s running it?
Not

SOMEONE,
she scathed,
not a person: a force,

a nameless force!
But she could see that I did not

get it, that inhuman powers,

out of control, can kill you. So my mom,

who used to sleep with masking tape

stuck to her brow, to prevent wrinkles,

transmogrified her face, and became—

by slewing her mouth this way and that,

and rolling her eyes, and letting her head

wobble as her shoulders swayed back and forth

—Hale-Bopp. She looked like a comic actor

doing a drunk, she looked like a tough

kid on a corner, amusing the others,

a person with an identity,

who could play, enacting her own wild mother

veering toward her, or her father, falling

to his accidental death, or my father

lurching at her, or the wave of death

toppling her second husband, or her own

death, somewhere, its maw pulling

from side to side, its eyes unfocused,

hurtling toward her, an error, a horror—all

mimed with reckless energy, to astound and delight me.