Our Andromeda (2 page)

A strong, pale wind on the thighs,

it was no seaspray, no
AC
,

but cold mnemonic, a breath

of spotless decision,

a kind of bulk, a true surface

thickened by foreign pears

as if winter brought its fruit

first to me for approval

before it let December

fill its basket to capacity.

I spoke too calmly for one

who didn't believe in anything.

Mouth full of pears,

full of promises I'd no way

to speak, much less keep, I tended

to gesture toward a Universal

Field of Grass, hoping to break

as many blades as my wide self

could in one pass. One pass—

but we're wasted with feeling,

breathing funny and stuck rough

like an
IV
into a paralyzed arm.

And that's the World's Arm

that can't write anymore,

or sign its name, or pick

the thickness from the trees.

My fingerprints transform

into proboscis, by degrees.

simultaneously orange and violet

(though my eyes are closed), is

either my inner color (that covered mirror)

or simply dusk.

An opaline sheet

pulled because the night is ashamed

to come in front of everyone,

blacking out in joy.

Too shy to spill its milk on the stained

tablecloth of strangers

as I have. When it's finally dark

outside, it's finally

loose inside and the doubleness

of things seems too true to be good:

my way
and
the highway.

Night. It has two hands

I can use. Its fingers in a plum

too ripe not to split.

I had to split it. It was so much

itself—bloody flesh,

wild purple skin. A fistful

so lush it was almost imaginary,

smelling of love, it didn't matter whose.

Amplified blueness,

that is to say, I can hear it,

though it isn't music

or a voice but a self

apart from self itself. A handiwork.

Its horrible it-ness.

If only the plain brown splotch—

my home, my head—had a place,

a say, the way rancid meat still

has protein. Something to offer.

A little brown dog waves its paw

as if to say, I know all about it.

The it-ness. Broken into bits

so sharp everything gets cut to

sharp bits. Anything small has a kind

of integrity—whole, ridiculous—

god simply cannot have.

I mean, where's the magic

or the logic in being It

and hiding It? In seeing

foolishness, remaining wise?

Everyone's mouth of music

swallowed with salt. Oh, to be

in those waters when it matters.

A prayer is like a fishmouth,

opening dumbly onto just more

water at best or a hook

if it really wants an answer.

God (his blue holiness, his dry

drunk) is no real mystery,

unlike the wind-taut sail

and shining gulls and tiny souls

at everlasting work on the plain

brown boat in a bottle on the sea.

The unplowed road is unusable

unless there's no snow.

But in dry, warm weather,

it's never called an unplowed road.

To call it so, when it isn't so,

doesn't make it so, though it is so

when it snows and there's no plow.

It's a no-go. Let's stay inside.

And here we are again:

no cake without breaking

eggs, unless it's a vegan cake

in which there are never any eggs

only the issue, the question,

the primacy of eggs,

which remains even in animal-free

foods, eaten by animal-free

humans in an inhumane world, lit

with robots breathing

powerlessly in nature.

O streetlamp,

wallflower clairvoyant,

you are so futuristically

old-fashioned,

existing in the daytime

for later, because it becomes

later eventually, then

earlier, then later again.

And a place is made

for that hope, if I call

it hope when half the time

is erased by the other half.

Light becomes itself

in the dark, and becomes

nothing when the real light

comes. It is enough to make

even the simplest organism

insane. Why did the chicken

cross the unplowed road?

Because it was trying

to beat the egg to the other side.

It wanted to be first,

at last, and to stay first,

at least until the day

breaks itself sunny side,

and the rooster crows.

The only snows are dark snows.

In a light chocolatine room

with blackout windows,

a loud clock drowns in soft dawn's

syllables, crisscrossed

with a broken cloudiness

I'd choose as my own bedcovers

but cannot. My choice of sleep

or sky has no music of its own.

There's no “its own” while the baby cries.

Oh, the baby cries. He howls and claws

like a wrongly minor red wolf

who doesn't know his mother.

I know I am his mother, but I can't

quite click on the word's essential aspects,

can't denude the flora

or disrobe the kind of housecoat

“mother” always is. Something

cunty, something used.

Whatever meaning the word itself

is covering, like underwear,

that meaning is so mere and meager

this morning. Mother. Baby.

Chicken and egg. It's so obnoxious

of me: I was an egg

who had an egg

and now I'm chicken,

as usual scooping up

both possibilities,

or what I used to call

possibilities. I used

to be this way, so ontologically

greedy, wanting to be it all.

Serves me right.

My belief in the fluidity

of the self turns out to mean

my me is a flow of wellwater,

without the well, or the bucket,

a hole dug and seeping.

A kind of unwell, where

the ground reabsorbs

what it was displaced to give.

The drain gives meaning to the sieve.

As I said: a chicken who still

wants to be all potential.

Someone who springs

and falls, who cannot see

how many of us I have

in me—and I do not like them all.

Do I like us? Can I love us?

If anyone comes

first it's him, but how can that be?

I was here way, way first.

I have the breasts, godawful, and he

the lungs and we share the despair.

For we are a we, aren't we? We split

a self in such a way that there isn't

enough for either of us.

The father of the baby is sleepy

and present in his way, in the way

of fathers. He is devoted like

few fathers and maybe hurts

like I hurt, like no fathers.

I don't know what someone else

feels, not even these someones

who are also me. Do they hurt

like I do? Why can't they

tell me, or morse or sign: let

me know they know where and how

and why it hurts? Or something?

What is the point of other people,

being so separate, if we can't

help a person get that pain

will stick its shiv into anything,

just to get rid of the weapon

and because it can? For if we share

ourselves then they, too, must

also be in so much pain.

I can hear it. Oh, my loves.

The wood of the crib, the white

glow of the milk (which must

have siphoned off the one

and only pure part of me, leaving

me with what, toxicity

or sin or mush?), the awful softness.

I've been melted into something

too easy to spill. I make more

and more of myself in order

to make more and more of the baby.

He takes it, this making. And somehow

he's made more of me, too.

I'm a mother now.

I run to the bathroom, run

to the kitchen, run to the crib

and I'm not even running.

These places just scare up as needed,

the wires that move my hands

to the sink, to the baby,

to the breast are electrical.

I'm in shock.

One must be in shock to say so,

as if one's own state is assessable,

like a car accident or Minnesota taxes.

A total disaster, this sack of liquid

flesh which yowls and leaks

and I'm talking about me

not the baby. Me, this puddle

of a middle, this utilized vessel,

cracked hull, divine

design. It's how it works. It's how

we all got here. Deform

following the function…

But what about me?
I whisper

secretly and to think,

around these parts used to be

the joyful place of sex,

what is now this intimate

terror and squalor.

My eyes burned out at three a.m. and again

at six and eleven. This is why the clock

is drowning, as I said earlier.

I'm trying to explain it.

I repeat myself, or haven't I already?

Tiny self, alone with a tiny self.

I'll say it: he hurt me, this new

babe, then and now.

Perhaps he always will,

though thoughts of the future

seem like science fiction novels

I never finished reading.

Their ends like red nerves

chopped off by cleaver, not aliens,

this very moment, saving nothing for later.

He howls with such fury and clarity

I must believe him.

No god has the power

to make me believe anything,

yet I happen to know

this baby knows a way out.

This dark hole closing in on me

all around: he'll show me

how to get through

the shock and the godlessness

and the rictus of crushed flesh,

into the rest of my life.

The dark cracks separating

the white boards

think they're alone.

Why must I be burdened

with knowing

there are so many?

Or is this what god thinks?

Or am I what god thinks?

Or am I alone?

I am dreaming of a house just like this one

but larger and opener to the trees, nighter

than day and higher than noon, and you,

visiting, knocking to get in, hoping for icy

milk or hot tea or whatever it is you like.

For each night is a long drink in a short glass.

A drink of blacksound water, such a rush

and fall of lonesome no form can contain it.

And if it isn't night yet, though I seem to

recall that it is, then it is not for everyone.

Did you receive my invitation? It is not

for everyone. Please come to my house

lit by leaf light. It's like a book with bright

pages filled with flocks and glens and groves

and overlooked by Pan, that seductive satyr

in whom the fish is also cooked. A book that

took too long to read but minutes to unread—

that is—to forget. Strange are the pages

thus. Nothing but the hope of company.

I made too much pie in expectation. I was

hoping to sit with you in a treehouse in a

nightgown in a real way. Did you receive

my invitation? Written in haste, before

leaf blinked out, before the idea fully formed.

An idea like a stormcloud that does not spill

or arrive but moves silently in a direction.

Like a dark book in a long life with a vague

hope in a wood house with an open door.

(a poem inside a poem)

That is, why should they get two stabs at it while the virtuous

trudge along at half-speed, half-mast, halfhearted?

If an ordinary human can pull the fattest cashwad

out of the slimmest slit,

and the fullest pudding out of the skimmest milk,

then it might be possible

to insert a meager life in Andromeda

into, at the very least, our wide pit of sleep.

Duplicity after all takes many, not merely two, forms,

and just the very idea

of doubleness, twinniness, or even simple, simpering

regret, or nostalgia, implies

a kind of Andromeda,

a secret world, the hidden draft, the tumor-sibling,

the “there-are-no-accidents” plane we could learn to fly.

There's always that irreducible “something extra”

to life on Earth:

The way some men won't “talk that way” in front of women,

not wanting to astonish us with their secret man-ness,

as if there is another world bisecting ours,

living among us like an unspeakable mold.

The recent invention of the double-decker pill,

equally effective on sunny
and
rainy days.

On the wall, a plural mural: a diptych of Paula 'n' Wally's.

What fallopian and what fellatio! Like a Nan Goldin oldie,

but an impostor. Okay. Why not try to offer more

squalor no matter who the photographer?

When someone's called a “lifer” it means that person is trapped.

A “lifer” has no real life but what do we call the rest of us?

How terrifying it is to try trying!

Which frying pan will best

kill the loved one? Which will

make the best omelet?

The books on the bookshelves are touching themselves

like virgins. But I've had them.