Original Fire (9 page)

Then one day the gray rags vanish

and the sweet wind rattles her sash.

Her secrets bloom hot. I’m wild for everything.

My body is a golden armor around my unborn child’s body,

and I’ll die happy, here on the ground.

I bend to the mixture of dirt, chopped hay,

grindings of coffee from our dark winter breakfasts.

I spoon the rich substance around the acid-loving shrubs.

I tear down last year’s drunken vines,

pull the black rug off the bed of asparagus

and lie there, knowing by June I’ll push the baby out

as easily as seed wings fold back from the cotyledon.

I see the first leaf already, the veined tongue

rigid between the thighs of the runner beans.

I know how the shoot will complicate itself

as roots fill the trench.

Here is the link fence, the stem doubling toward it,

and something I’ve never witnessed.

One moment the young plant trembles on its stalk.

The next, it has already gripped the wire.

Now it will continue to climb, dragging rude blossoms

to the other side

until in summer fruit like green scimitars,

the frieze of vines, and then the small body

spread before me in need

drinking light from the shifting wall of my body,

and the fingers, tiny stems wavering to mine,

flexing for the ascent.

This is the last month, the petrified forest

and the lake which has long since turned to grass.

The sun roars over, casting its light and absence

in identical seams. One day. Another.

The child sleeps on in its capsized boat.

The hull is weathered silver and our sleep is green and dark.

Dreams of the rower, hands curled in the shape of oars,

listening for the cries of the alabaster birds.

All is silent, the animals hurled into quartz.

Our bed is the wrecked blue island of time and love.

Black steeples, black shavings of magnetized iron,

through which the moon parades her wastes,

drawing the fruit from the female body,

pulling water like blankets up other shores.

Then slowly the sky is colored in, the snow

falls evenly into the blackness of cisterns.

The steel wings fan open that will part us from each other

and the waves break and fall according to their discipline.

Breath that moves on the waters.

Small boat, small rower.

When they were wild

When they were not yet human

When they could have been anything,

I was on the other side ready with milk to lure them,

And their father, too, each name a net in his hands.

1

I am here to praise this body

on loan from the gods

by which we know the god in us

and see the god made earth,

pulled out blue and stunned into the lights.

2

Sometimes in the frenzy of first events

there comes to me a strange

declamatory awareness

as though my consciousness has stirred

from the heap of broken toys

and new toys

that is my baby’s existence.

When I look into her eyes I see below

the surface of things

into the water of the other surface

through the layers of that surface

to the original fire.

3

When you wake sometimes, crying

in the pure desolation of the newly realized,

I dream you are drifting off

in your little boat.

I crawl to you like swimming and hold you in my arms

and then I wonder if it was cruel, yes, cruel,

to force you with such violence through my body.

To bring you here.

That is why, when I find you,

I lay my hands upon you

in so tender a way

that you do not feel me quite at first.

I draw you back and you are calmed.

That is why I touch you with a lightness

I can repeat nowhere else.

That is why these anxious pictures

of you, larger every month, and why I call

your name continually,

throwing it out like an anchor.

1 Transformation

My husband was a prince who kissed me

until my eyes bulged and my skin

melted to a green film on my bones.

My mouth split my face

and I croaked,
take me, oh take me.

So I was, deeper

into my startling new body.

As I sank back onto the wet springs

of my haunches, as I powerfully gathered

my tongue unfolded in a blur,

a sticky lasso,

and plucked a fly from his lapel—

my last wifely act.

2 Control

At first, I hated this body,

my lung-thin skin, my temptress spots.

I wanted red silk and you gave me this!

Advantages—my bones are bendable straws

through which I drink sun,

golden yolk, food of inner life, heat, tremendous wish.

And there is night and the many voices

seething delirium

universal mirrors that are my eyes

implacable gold

What you change cannot love you.

I told him that. He kissed me anyway.

3 Origin

I was hungry, so the author of all things

gave me the flies of sorrow to eat.

Gave me the underslung heroic couplets

of a man’s breast to drink from.

Gave me the perfect nothing

of my own original soul

to dive and dive in never touching bottom.

Sometimes I have the memory of what it was like

to be truly lovely

to dance by candlelight and tear the filmy cotton lace

off my nipples and draw you in.

Sometimes I have the memory of what it was like

to be another kind of food.

4 King Black Snake

My god, my predator,

to get away from you I change shapes.

I become the laughter at my core.

My breasts are soft.

My hair is dull.

I am growing into the body

of the old woman who will bear me

toward my death,

my death which will do me no harm.

Every day the calico cat returns from the fields

with a mouse in her jaws.

After every bite of the tender lawn, the ground squirrel

jerks and flinches,

but no hawk drops out of the sky.

The fat creature continues to eat, nervously

stuffing itself with pleasure.

I watch him as I drink from a bottle of grassy wine.

Why do I long

to be devoured and to forget

in life rather than in death?

What is the difference?

I won’t drink wine tonight

I want to hear what is going on

not in my own head

but all around me.

I sit for hours

outside our house on Blind Mountain.

Below this scrap of yard

across the ragged old pasture,

two horses move

pulling grass into their mouths, tearing up

wildflowers by the roots.

They graze shoulder to shoulder.

Every night they lean together in sleep.

Up here, there is no one

for me to fail.

You are gone.

Our children are sleeping.

I don’t even have to write this down.

I have moved beyond my life

into the blueness of the tiny flower

called Sky Pilot.

The sheer stain of the petals

fills the sky in my heart.

Over the field,

two bluebirds pause

on shivering wings.

They could as well have been a less glorious

color, and the flowers too.

Why were we given this unearthly radiance, this blueness,

if not to seek it out, to love it with all our hearts?

for Persia

Under ledge, under tar, under fill

under curved blue stone of doorsteps,

under the aggregate of lakebed rock,

under loss and under hard words,

under steamrollers

under your heart,

it doesn’t matter. They can live forever.

The seeds of thistles

push from nowhere, forming a rose of spikes

that spreads all summer until it

stands in a glory of

needles, blossoms, blazing

purple clubs and fists.

I’m brave.

I’m kind.

These are our powers.

Boys are coming!

How about we lead them into a trap and run?

We’re both the bravest twins.

Identicals.

Only you like blue.

And I like orange.

Remember you have to act like

me and I have to act like you?

Don’t kill the spider.

I forgot the crocodile hole!

We both can’t die.

Our special rope tells us what to do.

I got you. I won’t let you fall.

I’ll shoot the jump rope over to the other side.

The king is chasing.

The rainstorm has heard our plan. Oh,

they are following us. We will have no choice

but to marry now. You will be a daughter.

I will be the rainstorm’s wife.

But watch out.

The king has poisonous teeth.

for Aza

Little blue eyeglasses,

I give you the honored task

of assisting my youngest daughter

in her work, which is to see not only

general shapes but specific details

and minute variations in the color and texture

of objects ranging from immense

(Ocean. Sky.) To very tiny.

(Invertebrate hidden at edge of carpet)

Little blue eyeglasses,

I charge you with the solemn responsibility

of depth perception. Guide her steps

through dim corridors

and allow her to charge down

the staircase into my arms

without injury. Above all,

little blue eyeglasses,

train her eyes upon the truth

and let her eyes rest in the truth

and help her see within the truth the strength

to bear the truth.

Sometimes you have to take your own hand

as though you were a lost child

and bring yourself stumbling

home over twisted ice.

Whiteness drifts over your house.

A page of warm light

falls steady from the open door.

Here is your bed, folded open.

Lie down, lie down, let the blue snow cover you.

for Abel

The sky glows yellow over the tin hump

of Mount Anaeus, and below on the valley floor

the fog cracks and lifts.

Beyond it the throat of the river flares.

The river shakes its body

of terminal mirrors.

I saw you walk down the mountain yesterday.

You were wearing your stained blue jacket,

your cheap, green boots.

You disappeared into a tree

the way you always did, in grief.

I went looking for you.

In the orchard floored with delicate grass,

I lay down with the deer.

A sweet, smoky dust rose

from the dead silver of firs.

When I stand in the circle of their calm black arms

I talk to you. I tell you everything.

And you do not weep.

You accept

how it was

night came down.

Ice formed on your eyelids.

How the singing began, that was not music

but the cold heat of stars.

Wind runs itself beneath the dust like a hand

lifting a scarf.

Mother, you say, and I hold you.

I tell you I was wrong, I am sorry.

So we listen to the coyotes.

And their weeping is not of this earth

where it is called sorrow, but of another earth

where it is known as joy,

and I am able

to walk into the tree of forgiveness with you

and disappear there

and know myself.