I thought my body
would work forever,
like a rocking horse,
a Ferris wheel, or grass
returning. Now I carry myself
as a coffin, the sharp corner
digging into my collarbone,
hands sweating
and burning, neck spasming,
a blister at the life line.
I’ll never get it to the car.
The Night Where You No Longer Live
Was it like lifting a veil
And was the grass treacherous, the green grass
Did you think of your own mother
Was it like a virus
Did the software flicker
And was this the beginning
Was it like that
Was there gas station food
and was it a long trip
And is there sun there
or drones
or punishment
or growth
Was it a blackout
And did you still create me
And what was I like on the first day of my life
Were we two from the start
And was our time an entrance
or an ending
Did we stand in the heated room
Did we look at the painting
Did the snow appear cold
Were our feet red with it, with the wet snow
And then what were our names
Did you love me or did I misunderstand
Is it terrible
Do you intend to come back
Do you hear the world’s keening
Will you stay the night
Ever
Never, never, never, never, never.
—KING LEAR
Even now I can’t grasp “nothing” or “never.”
They’re unholdable, unglobable, no map to nothing.
Never? Never ever again to see you?
An error, I aver. You’re never nothing,
because nothing’s not a thing.
I know death is absolute, forever,
the guillotine-gutting loss to which we never say goodbye.
But even as I think “forever” it goes “ever”
and “ever” and “ever.” Ever after.
I’m a thing that keeps on thinking. So I never see you
is not a thing or think my mouth can ever. Aver:
You’re not “nothing.” But neither are you something.
Will I ever really get never?
You’re gone. Nothing, never—ever.
Mistaken Self-Portrait as Persephone in the Desert
One hot afternoon, I toured the old prison for POWs.
There are no people here, only facilities for holding them.
One doesn’t think of the Underworld as being bright,
but I lived in the desert, under that big sky, as if I were belowground.
I watched a film of a Beckett play. I love order, Clov says at one point. It’s my dream.
A world where all would be silent and still, and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.
In the desert there is order. All the prisoners were silent and still and in their places.
And then you know what. The blisterfire bombs, shudder-thuds, floodlights, dazed
cracks, canines.
Of course, this chaos is their minds.
In reality they lie on cots the long, hot afternoons, and paint murals
of the land they see from their windows. It’s this detail I find so—
imagine being in prison and drawing what lies just outside: humps of nothing, dun-yellow needles, flat vulture sky.
We must accept who we are.
Proust said, The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but
in having new eyes.
When I dream, I dream that my mother was never frightened for me.
In the painting at the house I stay in there is a film being shown, a celluloid film.
A child asks for more. Then she’s leaving the orphanage,
a suitcase in her tiny hand, a box of food, a waiting train.
She is rubbing her eyes, trying to see, and my mother
is rubbing her back, warm hand on bone.
They’re not thinking of the land they left behind, of all they’ve lost.
So I’m painting the desert before us. Look:
the dry scrubthe yellows and blues
the sharp eyes of cactus needles
Expecting
I’m six months along
and I wonder why nobody
told me. I’ve got red wine
in my right hand, a cigarette
in my left. There’s
a noisy party all
around me. I put down
the glass and lift my shirt.
The baby’s there, visible
under my transparent
skin, a little girl, wearing
bluebird barrettes.
I think she’s mad at me.
What a lush!
she’s thinking.
Her hair is gold,
too short for barrettes,
so I wonder if they’re
actually part of her skull. She’s
got blue veins all under
her skin. My stomach
wobbles like Jell-O.
It’s time for her to be
born, another guest at the party
says, and my dead mother
helps me lift the pregnant belly off,
unscrewing it like a cork.
Little girl, I’m sorry
I took no prenatal
vitamins, I ate the sushi,
which was delicious,
and today the newspaper
led with a story
about impoverished zoos
deciding which species
they’ll no longer
protect and breed. But there’s
room for you. I just
didn’t know what to think,
I just didn’t know how to think of you.
Miscarriage
your romantic, imprecise side:
the time you glimpseda hawk on the road
and thought it was your mother—
a conception
misled by want
Mistaken Self-Portrait as Mother of an Unmade Daughter
Do you not want to be alive?
I can’t say I don’t understand—
To bring something into the world,
a creature that will be ruled by the conflict between its “will”
and its impulses, surroundings, limitations. . . .
We choose many things, but we can’t say we choose existence.
My existence is not mine
the way my opinions are, my blue crepe pants,
my taste for cherries.
My existence belongs in some sense to my parents, and to
the universe—or God, if you believe in god.
It belongs to evolution,
the galaxy and the space beyond,
to black holes, to red dwarfs, to
hydrogen and oxygen and carbon.
My existence belongs to iron.
I understand, in a way, my body’s
reluctance
to impose existence on another—
and yet I—I almost feel you are real
and I know you, turning over the beach shell in my hands,
remembering the red sailboat shirt you wore all this summer,
with a button for the yellow sun—
•
With my small phone always tucked about my person
under the great lavender sky I’ll set forth
on a pilgrimage
to the bridge that wayaccept
the noble truth
which is to be absorbed
in the enormity of it without fail
even if the precipice
keeps leaving you voicemails—
•<
br />
Perhaps you don’t come
because it’s more painful
to me to have you
than not to?
: the person who first put a boat
in a bottle
and later wondered
why she’d had the impulse
to contain—
•
Before you have sight
the colors sway underneath your eyes
like kelp.
It is false to speak like this, but
false not to speak of you—
all the language I have for you
is ornamental—
but the sun is no ornament
go out and see it
stand under it rushing onward
let the body go borderless and drained
a scrim
for the light to come through.
At Père Lachaise
It wasn’t always going to be like this.
You were going to read books and grow up
and understand more. You weren’t going
to bury people, you were going to study
Proust’s gray-black grave at Père Lachaise
and read the note the French girl left there.
Who was she with her bobbed hair, her violin case?
One day you would die but it was so far away
time itself would be different by then—
only time is not different as the years go by
just faster and it gets harder not easier to die.
So you practice: climb the blue and unremembered hills,
catch your breath on the bridge
between the cliffs, trumpet flowers
blooming like the robber barons’ wild hair.
Your first bike was blue with ribbons,
you called her BlueBell.
Along Pierrepont Street you sped
wondering who Pierre was and where
his bridge had been: were you now
riding over it unable to see the chasm
of violet rocks below your pedaling feet—?
Proust you are dead but I am reading
your white bones your black words.
I laugh aloud in the French interior designer’s
soft white bed eating a pistache macaron.
When we die gloved in earth we’ll wonder why
we ever felt aswim in shame the lawns of June
were ablaze the lawns ablaze
Interlude (Posthumous)
When I’m dead
my daughters
will shuffle their impossible bodies
along the tombstone’s soft grass,
and on the damp stone
lay their cheeks, saying
Mother, why did you not
value us?
II
What It Was Like
Your green mind is an ocean you can’t enter,
sleeping in the bed hours each day.
Blurry figures move in the rooms around you.
Someone cooks a Christmas feast. Another buys
complicated, precise plastic goods,
distributes them around the house.
The past opens into a lamp, a bee colony,
a book about mitochondria under attack.
You want to be alone in the deep,
the spiky sea urchins drifting along the floor,
the fish starting and shivering, the reef fading.
Instead you’re like the dead in deadpan.
In the subway the billboards ask
DID I REALLY DIE? The snow on the sidewalk
graying. The buckets of footsteps gone.
You keep saying, this is my hand,
it hurts, please take it away.
Hating and wanting in equal measure,
jealous of the others’ human time,
the way their bodies work:
cells dividing, cytokines quiet.
Not yours. You stare at the ceiling,
eating superfoods, taking pills, rubbing
your liver with castor oil,
spooning down maca and nettles.
Notebook pages scrawled with the facts:
the what-went-wrong-and-how, the police
searchlight squall of pursuit, the verdict
always about to be delivered.
Idiopathic Illness
I threw hollowed self at your robust,
went for IV drips, mercury detoxes, cilantro smoothies.
I pressed my lips to you, fed you kale, spooned down coconut oil.
I fasted for blood sugar, underboomed the carbs,
chased ketosis, urine-stripped and slip-checked.
Baked raw cocoa & mint & masticated pig thyroids.
You were contemporary, toxic, I can’t remember what you were,
you’re in my brain, inflaming it, using up the glutathione.
I read about you on the Internet & my doctor agreed.
Just take more he urged & more.
You slipped into each cell. I went after you with a sinking inside
and medical mushrooms for maximum oom, I plumbed
you without getting to nevermore. O doom.
You were a disease without name, I was a body gone flame,
together, we twitched, and the acupuncturist said, it looks difficult,
stay calmish. What can be said? I came w/o a warranty.
Stripped of me—or me-ish-ness—
I was a will in a subpar body.
I waxed toward all that waned inside.
Human-Sized Pain
It was a me I couldn’t let go,
in Sauconys and sweat-wicking shirts,
in mules and a miniskirt, in fear, in numbness,
virusy, wired and dumb, and all of a sudden
praying. I shuddered a little like
one does in a dream. The pain
arrived as if from inside me,
reaching out of my marrow into my mind.
I tried to act, to alleviate, to assuage.
But it didn’t get better
with time; time made it worse.
To know my pain you had
to want what I wanted but not have it,
you had to watch the years unfurl
into yellow leaves without leaving.
No, forget the leaves—too poetic.
To know it you had to live without,
while those around you lightly had
and had and kept on having.
I believed less and less
in the future. All that possibility,
dwindled to a nothing, but.
Four, five, six, the months,
four, five, six, the years.
It was an image in a photograph
that kept getting blurrier
even as the resolution grew clearer.
It’s not like missing the dead
or wanting another chance at love;
it shimmers on lakes,
is especially strong in the summer,
clinging to me like a person
who can’t swim but wants
to be in the water, a thing
that will drown me
just to show me who I am.
Poem (Problem)
I kept trying to put the pain into a poem,
but all I did was write the word “pain”
in my notebook, over and over.
A Note on Process
1.
I began by keeping track of my time. It was February and the snow had been falling all morning. I rarely saw any people on the sidewalk outside, though I could detect the traces of their passage, which the fresh snow quickly covered. I was reading a book about a gymnast whose body seemed to contain an important mystery. I read a little and then I watched archival footage on YouTube, so I could see it “for myself.” I surrounded myself with this moment.
2.
Watching the gymnast land a dismount from the uneven bars gave me a sense of infinite possibility, as if the routine
were a process occurring over and over and over. I was a girl wanting to be a gymnast, studying her photographs—her gravity-defying body—in the small hot gym where I practiced. And I was thirty-seven with a body that didn’t work.
3.
The routine of my days was itself without shape or end, although I understood there would be an ultimate end.
4.
When I finished her biography I made a list of what I had “done” all day. This was a failure, as it should have taken as much time to write as living itself did. But failing was fine with me. I wanted to formulate myself around a list written in precise ink, not merely to fall asleep on the couch again, to slip under.
5.
I went to the kitchen to take a drug the doctors had given me, a little imploring thing.
6.
What did I know about glory at that age? the gymnast wrote in her memoir. To me, competing was about improving my body and mind—overcoming frustrations, anger, and jealousy so that, in one shining moment, my body became a tool driven by unwavering concentration and desire.
7.
The clip of the gymnast doing her perfect routine never lost its patina for me. In it I could see the will honed to a fine tool, a ferocious act of attention. This was a process I couldn’t imagine not being part of—
Even as I had begun to reconcile myself to exactly that.
Caged in a body that would not let me escape it—;