Friday, September 3, 2021

little scar



XXIV

one:

I like that thought: that the dark knows
how tall we are, how small we are,
if we shake in it or if we become  in it.

We are marked here, aren’t we?  And
whatever happens there, the scars are the echo
of our departure, a long, long hum, pulse.

I remember the dog that bit me.  Alone, this
poor mutt had likely been beaten
before he came to be tied, houseless,

to our tree.  I saw the black-veined meat
of his gums, as if his opening jaw were on
slow cinema—before he sunk his teeth in my left

cheek, three inches from my eye. 
I was four.  My daughter’s age now.
A piece of him is still there, resting

on my jaw-bone, or in the ball

and socket of my jaw, slightly out of grind.
It sets me—this jaw, shaped by a little dog.
Later I would defend him—he wasn’t provoked,

he was just hungry.  Lonely.  Sad.  When
my father shot him, I wonder if his expression
was relief.  Standing there then, face to mouth

with my dog, was/is my first memory of dark-
ness and how much of it I could stand in
without crying out, dog, me, hanging on.

Yes, just the dog and me.  A hot August day…
somewhere, miles away, my father was cutting
hay.  Drinking beer.  That tractor, moving

in low groans, is like the dog, after I’m able
to pull away, who leaps one more time.  By then,
I’m on my face in the blurry grasses

and he reaches the end of his chain.  It vibrates
and sings.  Even today, thirty six years later,
when I hear a chain gone on force to its end, I smell

that dog, our spit and blood, the piles of his shit I fell in
getting away, the scar of our agreement left
and now a low stitched moon, or part of one…

two:

Baby, you will have a scar.  They’ll cut a thin line
of skin across  your abdomen, pull the flesh
open to peer at what’s not working in your dark.

But that will be later.  After ten days of surveillance
and tinctures of time, you were eating.
you were passing water.  And solids.

And they let you come home.  We had carried
your coming home clothes with us everywhere.
Soft, off-white fleece.  You looked like

a pillow I could lay my head down on, finally,
and sleep.  And pray, maybe, to some quiet god,
a gratitude, and to beg

for sufficient breasts
to feed your days and nights with the safety
of a warm fully belly.



Monday, August 16, 2021

 


Retro/In(tro)-

spection

 

inchmeal (adv)

              by inches, inch by inch, by small portions, little by little.

inanition, (n)

              the action or process of emptying; the condition of being

              empty; spec. the exhausted condition resulting from want

              or insufficiency of nourishment

 

Days and days before my labor was to be made its own open

and shut case feeble cracks seemed somewhere inside of me,  

 

somewhere climbing beside the baby, and were letting clean

amniotics out through to the open world.  Slow motion drain,

 

a sudden crush of pain and the substance was on my thigh

and busy, and ashamed, I’d mistaken it for pee.  I was mad

 

at myself for not keeping it in, keeping it clean, the fault obviously,

OBVIOUSLY! mine.  The baby seemed peaceful in this

 

dwindling sea, tight swaddle that he was.  Imagine the scent

of the sea was between my legs, a tide finding the full bowl

 

of the cove of my pelvis and pressure cracking what all it would. 

And the illuminating moon was a tired eye, milky with clouds,

 

closing the shoals, slowing the motor, bow nudging

the summits of the rocks, rudder coming undone, invisible,

 

underneath it all  

Friday, June 7, 2019

xy





XY

you were born red faced and already turning  (lifted,
true, through the unzipped uterus) and who knew
you were turning that sort of blue though only on the inside
where nobody could see you (you were so

quiet being newly alive at least on the outside) who knew
or wanted to that you were dying in there dying

almost and as as as soon as you began

to swallow: swallow air swallow milk swallow
anesthesia all of every nothing that was a you and me

was a we recovering: what the nurse counting, naming tools
so she didn't stitch them in

reminded me that they say how lust needs to become
lusty it needs to become

hunger when lungs loco-
mote with flames the first burn an untinctured

Pentecost that all babies who live past being blue need
to survive, especially 

even on the inside (you did it you did but it took you
weeks of breathing and heart beating and not

eating and maybe even to make up your mind to make it
to surrender even more than most only those few days old:

to wriggle shhhh beneath the scalpel Peter Rabbit
and the precision of a pediatric surgeon and her incision

exposing your blue compacted glacier of a colon, all those micro
organisms dying into the trap of ultramarine, a pressure only

Vermeer perfected and died knowing and you made
generously inside of you so generously inside of you.

Sunday, December 20, 2015

toward mount kailash




XVII.

yes, even sky became a garden.
The clouds banked west like Shiva’s mountain.”

 Deborah Digges: “THE GARDENS OFFERED IN PLACE OF MY MOTHER’S DYING—"



friends: would you take me 
from this hospital

of his birth to hospital 
of his tincture?  north


and then north?  and more north?
and yet more north?

to a commodious 
parking lot?

i'll feel in every pot-hole
and every frost heave a penance, 

and every red and go.

i'll hear every soundless hurry,
hurry, hurry, hurry to me.

it is windy.
it is cold.

i will loose
my sandal straps.

even as it seems a mile
and another mile,

down these halls and walls i'll know
better than my own

mother—

i'll say yes to the flecked blue 
mucosed carpet next to my nose, i'll 

bruise the high wooden railing,
whose curves and lefts then rights

then left again turns get solidly to his light.
friends: meet me at the end of it all.

we'll 

still

be 

alive.



Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Passage, Cave-in







and what a rebellion
     to leap into it
          and hold on,
               connecting everything,
the past to the future—
                                   Mary Oliver--"The Hermit Crab"
                 




XVI.

They wouldn’t let me leave
unless I could pass
all the air
left to lay beneath the stitched
x over x of my uterus,
my scabbed belly.

Laxative and water and solid.
Trying to push it out was dangerous,
more than labor.  And like you my boy
it was slow in letting go.
Ultimately, because I was so desperate
to leave,
I lied.  Of course I’m farting.  Absolutely.
Can I go now?

Later I would say
(only to myself because it seemed
so small a consequence)
that I didn’t feel
like I’d given birth
at all—
places that should have been raw
with urgency's rash
were slick as buttermilk.
Clean.  And tight.
And mute.

bed-rails, doorjambs, shower
walls, I forced myself to walk
to cling to
to clean myself
for the ride
to another plastic bed

a room full of sick babies
and you, biggest bruiser.
while the caverns and turns
in your colon went slowly
dark and descended the way a fresh
sheet might, high in the air,
suspended so briefly it's not
even considered flight, there's a slight
wind dying, a kiss with-
out pressure, a trap

of air and bacteria pulling the dead
cells like stones off the wall
and piling them against the way
out.  but nobody knows.  only
your body.  and it's giving nothing.
not even a cry when i change
your dry, again, diaper...



Tuesday, December 15, 2015

opulent fat immaculate




XV

mute mammary, my cup is empty.
nothing but empty
for hour after hour day after day.

raised Catholic 
my once wanted to be a nun self  
thinks of Mary,

pregnant by God
or some anonymous Roman
occupier toughing her
at a well,

i ache to prostrate my bloated,
self, collapse
at her plaster feet and entreat
anything resembling milk. 
i could be a new Lourdes, 

liquid rich and miraculous
and I can leave by my pathetic
prosthetic pump

and swim away letting
rivers. 

i'm alone—i’m
not in some French
grotto pasting myself
with mud.  i’m so God
damned dry in this antiseptic

place i don’t even feel
the tingled let-down, the thin gilded
liquid drip down my nipple.  still
somewhere on the edge with Mary
i grope my clay

dissolving, and that thick ring
of colostrum
the size of a Jefferson nickle is all
i want.
opulent fat, immaculate,
i touch it
to my lips.  what else, since
you're sedated
ninety miles away,
to do with it?





Monday, December 14, 2015

a tuesday—and you are at rest





VII.

a tuesday—and you are at rest
and then you are not

you are at once an elastic flash
between what’s exact
and a stream of thawed stone flowing:

the sea the berg the sea the berg the sea 
we drift on
you and me
and this nau-sea,

first cold-cramped, then thermal calm,
walking in a department store
with a friend, and then
a little sprint
of fluid (there was no burst)
a slight pinch and blot
spread on the crotch
of my underwear.  i’d see the mid-wife
the next day.  i’d read and she’d said your head
would press on the bladder,
that i’d pee and feel the need to pee
a lot.

and i did tell her then
but she didn’t check…

and maybe things would have been different.

that casual amniotic leak
sometimes a teaspoon or two
sometimes enough to need new
clothes…

for days: spotting, calling, adjusting
my posture…

rigid.  suppressed.  the wet perception
of piss—but not that,
and not that word—rather:

~—water—~

your sea
moving past you and out of me,
under the the door
but it's days before you’d try
to come through yourself

and,  ultimately, could not…