Pizzle

 

Pizzle

 

Words, we’re told, are ours to own once we’ve known

them three completely independent times – listen:

the first time is a wash an auditory wash maybe an

eyecup wash how the whole bowl is closed over

the hollow & the offense is coaxed & cajoled &

hopefully wholly until finally the tiniest of piece

is rivered away and what remains is stored away.

 

Today is a birthday of a man I was once married

to a man I took to & should not have but I did, I had no

eyecup I had no hearing aid I only had my naivete

I had nothing else I went out into the weather

of it unprepared & he opened my coat in a blizzard

& I froze to death there.  No not to death but he

bent me and I broke against his heel. Struck, 

he walked off while I cradled my remains.

 

Today, the word I read in two different places two

different genres – one Drunk on Genocide and one

“The Weavers” – a poem, I didn’t expect it in 

the poem but I did in the description of whips used by

the Nazis – tell me: who but some kind of sadist

makes a dick into a whip?  It’s got to be some kind of

coincidence, reading this on his birthday, and all this

time having gone by without so much as being

 

in the same town or a city or even sometimes a country

this past quarter of a century.  

Some comfort must be taken, by force if needs be,

for letting a thumb of a different lover stumble and 

hover above that scar in the dark, & then, because

edges are made to either be stepped back from or jumped

off of, choosing the nudge, the lift of the hip

where in the clavicle of the bone, where the hurt has been

nurtured to the nerve, and choose, when the sounding

abates into the distance, give it over, give it entirely

over and be talked toward from the reverberating crack.

 

On Infertility

suspended hand
in his studio:
daniel chester french

 

On Infertility

 

Whatever it is I have looked for

Is tiny, so tiny it can dance in the palm of my hand.

 

                                    Charles Wright

                                    Looking Around

 

Selected Poems & Late

            it’s the opening. it states where,

            do I begin?  Because At my elbow: Kaddish

            for an Unborn Child.  And Deaf

            Republic.  And all those short

            stories by the Yiddish

            writer I. L. Peretz I’ve been

            meaning to get to.  So I open

            Bye and Bye instead.  To the last

            line of the first stanza, his

            “1 March, 1998, where do I begin again?”

 

            & it makes me need

to create my own 1 March 19-

98 nearly two years into the doomed 1^st

marriage.  I was finishing a year

            but really two because

            I transferred back home from Boulder

            of reading poetry & all her essays.

            I kept to it & to students & to

            hauling books around in a city

            bus.  I was unconceivable.  I’d

            read without reading that book

by Kertesz.  He was from the same

country I found myself in

though our distance between each

other meant we’d never know

one another.  Hungary.  Hungry.

Aside from the obvious, that being

I couldn’t read Hungarian – we had one thing

in common – we couldn’t

bring a child into this world.  Of course

yes it was for profoundly

different reasons – though as intimately

familiar & as personal.  His: Auschwitz.

Mine?  I was

alone.  Married, yes.  But utterly

alone.  With, it turns out, a broken womb.  Let’s go back

 

to Wright: he’s seeing

a man seeing & objects & didn’t I just see

an article seeing these still

lives in bottles and in urns and in pitchers

            with the lip to hip handles . . .

the paintings of Giorgio Morandi…

 

it’s a resurrection which makes me want

to say without the dead there cannot be

a thing brought

back to life.  But I want to

tell you this one last thing: I watched

the unhinged tissue & blood float

in the toilet bowl.  I watched

for something out of this mucous

that could have been a thumb, an eye-

lid, a hip, I watched it in the toilet

I saw what I saw

in that shocked gawk that made me

a selective mute about the whole

affair.  I hurt like I was burning

but I watched it & probably it was

my body that wasn’t blind

just bent to accommodate the wave

wave wave of it all while I tried, while

it was tried, to wash itself into being

extinguished.

 

bouquet beneath the weeping
beech
greely park
nashua, nh

 

 

Sometimes Climbing is Pausing

 

Sometimes Climbing is  Pausing

 

I thought of you today. 

I was climbing a mountain

and I imagined that

you were climbing it

 

with me.  At one of the steep

parts, when I started to

fall back into the weight

of the backpack and

 

the weight of the air,

I stopped and watched

a spider sun itself

on a flat, well-lit rock. 

 

I photographed it for you

knowing you

might not feel all that

comfortable around

 

spiders, but also knowing

the reason this spider is

still

with us is because I saw it

 

on the rock I was about

to step on.  I hope it is

somewhere else now, saved.

I hope it followed the sun

 

on its way down this mountain

the way I followed

my thoughts of you

on my way down this mountain.

Please,

 

Please,

           

                        For cousins wade, theresa

 

Never know the morning a new

Ache in the place where the old

Injury has made its tight residence

Insist itself for itself alone never giving

Up the ghost but only going relict,

Relic.  It’s mouth & hands small as a

Wren.  When it wakes it sings – it per-

Ches on the claimed ligament and

Opens its throat.  Somehow the hutch

Doesn’t go cold, even after all

These years.  Perpetual, the clutch

Of the eggs is the transformation of

Yolks into eyes, albumens into feathers

Tails & breasts & wings.  Semi-matured, it

Quakes on the edge of its first

Flight, the perch patient as any

Nesting abandoned.  See the muscle

Shake awake, flinching in the pinch of

Being.  It is here we want to widow our children

Selves, abandon them

On the lane half-way up to the house

That bore and beat them, tore their

Throat and gizzard & sent them songless

Out on the dawn.

 

Or never know how yesterday my cousin

Pulled over on the side of the road, a little

Gas station, a little break, having driven

From North Carolina to Louisiana to save

Her brother’s life.  And she did too.  Pulled

Him out of his coma with the strength of her

Permission & the swelling in his brain

Began to wane.  He woke, being weened, & she

Stayed long enough to set him on his course,

To hug her other brothers & sisters & plug her

Course home.  Exhausted but staying the way,

It was nothing but a straight shot & work

The next day.  Pulled to the rest

Stop something in her went slack.  At the pump?

In line to pay?  Filling her mug of coffee?  She

Keeled over & later they’d say she was probably

Dead before she met the floor, though they

Also said she coded three times, & under the paddles

Seemed to rally.  That ache.  The one

One wakes with.  The one one doesn’t want

To recognize or make way for, give a curt

Nod, a lowered lid to its dominance, a bend

Of the knee, the way a bird taking to her

Sky might bend, the start in their heart

Being what gets them airborne, into the shadow

That layered across its face & made them take up

To the clouds.

 

Standing at the Bay Window Holding a Basket of Unfolded Laundry

 

Standing at the Bay

Window Holding a Basket

of Unfolded Laundry

 

 

It’s trickery, the leaf folded in

such a fashion as to make me

think for an instant, for longer,

that it is a cedar waxwing.  This

 

dead lilac leaf in this morning

light.  In less than five minutes

it will be just a leaf

curled like an upright hand

 

whose thumb has drawn itself

up to its cousins in its attempt

to be a perfect buddhist:

Buddhist in the minute—

 

isn’t that the angle we’re peaking

out from, standing at our window

with the sun behind us,

on a morning when it all just

 

continues to rise?  Even the dead 

are made

to look lifelike—made and made

and made to  look like life.

What I Keep

 

What I Keep

 

What I keep doing

What I keep doing to

What I keep doing to my

What I keep doing to my self

I keep

I keep buying

I keep buying words

I keep them

I keep them stacked

I keep them stacked with

I keep them stacked with spines

I keep them stacked with spines out

I out them

I out them, column

I out them, columns

I out them, columns entitled

I out them, columns entitled and authored

I read them

I read them one

I read them one by

I read them one by one

I read them one by one possibly

I read them one by one possibly by

I read them one by one possibly by two

I read them one by one possibly by two then

I taste them

I taste them open

I taste them open yes

I taste them open yes open

I taste them open yes open-mouthed

I taste them open yes open-mouthed, tongued

I taste them open yes open-mouthed, tongued and toothed

I taste them open yes open-mouthed, tongued and toothed to

I taste them open yes open-mouthed, tongued and toothed to pulp

I taste them open yes open-mouthed, tongued and toothed to pulp enough

                                                                                                to pulp enough

                                                                                                to pulp enough to

                                                                                                to pulp enough to swallow

swallow and

swallow and I

swallow and I swallow

swallow and I swallow them

swallow and I swallow them gnashed

swallow and I swallow them gnashed pulpy

swallow and I swallow them gnashed pulpy communion

swallow and I swallow them gnashed pulpy communion body

I swallow them and I swallow them gnashed pulpy communion body, blood

I swallow

I taste

I read

I out

I keep

What I keep

 

The Wash

 

in bronze
andrew's hands

The Wash  

 

The wind sways not the leaves evenly.

                                    Paul Lynch

                                    The Black Snow

 

Like a new or lazy laundry maid I wash

            whites & darks together & like any good dye

            it rubs the light

            surface & makes the white breast, the white chest, the white short sleeve

                        the white calf the white toe the worn white heated heel

                        gray as an excavated & recovered

                        wound whose scar

                        is a smiling moon. 

All our sins are washed

            & strung to the sun & the sun blinds us

            for our devotions.  Somehow I’m caught

            on the weathered pin’s rusty hinge

                        and the wind is picking up.  & skies pass.

                        They pass by remarkable or not remarkable.

Days I’m too preoccupied to do much other

            than strut and string my gray wash & call it

            everything but what it is: difference.

            Difference, I think, is how I define

                        grief vs how I define mourning.

                        Grief is the heated brand thrust

                        out of the coals & pushed into the fleshiest

                        part of the heart, her left

                                    ventricle.  Mourning is the ritual of attendance

                                    to this wound: the flush and swoosh of saline,

                                                            whose salt has been mined & dried & stored all these years

 

                                                            and now a pinch of it into the water,

                                                            water from the well, from the river, from the salty bay. 

 

                                                            And attendance depends on the depth of the brand,   

                                                            on the gauze applied to keep the sutures true

                                                            to their form, & how white the gauze is, even after all

                                                            that washing.