Our Andromeda (4 page)

I burned a living rose in the fire,

its fleshsmell human.

The baby's breath also reeked

burnt. I learned the tarot

in one sitting—arcana slipping

into my mind like a beloved

hand under my pillow.

When I woke I was so hungry

I ate the last pear. Last for the year,

another rotten year in which

I don't need to save the pear for you.

It didn't matter how I sat with you.

I didn't have to cover my thighs

or make attractive angles.

I could look like a black spider

with flesh pockets

or a hairy, scrambled woman

and you would reach for even that.

I burned the pillow too,

so many objects here in the cabin

seemed to me akimbo

and interlocking. I put

everything in the fire

because it was too confusing.

What did the fatal illness say

to the nonfatal illness?

“Are you still working on that platelet

or can I get rid of it for you?”

When you show yourself to the woman

you love, you don't know your fear

is not fear itself. You have never been good,

but now you are so good,

who are you? Is it the liquidity of her skin

that bathes the world for you,

or her face, captured like a she-lion

in your own flesh?

This summerbed is soft with ring upon ring

upon ring of wedding, the kind

that doesn't clink upon contact, the kind

with no contract,

the kind in which the gold is only (only!) light.

Cloud covers and lifts,

and sleep and night, and soon enough

love's big fire laughs at a terrible burn,

but only (only!) because pain absorbs excess

joy and you shouldn't flaunt

your treasures in front of all day's eyes.

When standing naked, no mirror,

this is just me. Just me, justly

before a lover who breaks

this wholeness as if

he were a mirror

but with his mouth.

When you say I am beautiful

suddenly I stop being so

because you have claimed that.

I know where you go when you're hoping

to be happy: to your large, dark envelope,

pricking points of light with your tiny pin.

You call us stars, and use infantile words

like twinkle and wish, and faraway. But we're far

from far. We're in. And we're old.

We're the deep, hot gleam in your wet, cold holes.

We call them “eyes.” They are our only homes.

We shine nowhere else. The sky is a smother

of blank dust and explosion and vapor.

In your “eyes” we see fear, what you call sparkle.

We know it's fear because we already died. We know

how it felt. Listen: I am dead and you can't see it.

Do you know what this says about us both?

I'm begging: please choose me to be your star.

Wish on me. Love the oh-yes of my being dead

enough to call it brightness. If I can't be yours,

I am just a dark scar pulling the skin of the sky,

unnerved and fallen from the reach of your amazed

groping dream that everything lives twice.

That dream hurts me the best. I depend on it.

Get a new envelope and make one new pinhole.

Just one hole. Don't try to save the others.

Don't bother. I'm the lucky one. It's me. Me!

What did god say

to the friendless woman whose child

was ill and whose home was lost?

“And it's only Wednesday!”

We never knew closer

sisters, stronger trees,

tighter clans, wilder

fires. Where can we

go if not to each other,

resenting every step?

I wish I had more sisters,

enough to fight with and still

have plenty more to confess to,

embellishing the fight so that I

look like I'm right and then turn

all my sisters, one by one, against

my sister. One sister will be so bad

the rest of us will have a purpose

in bringing her back to where

it's good (with us) and we'll feel

useful, and she will feel loved.

Then another sister

will have a tragedy, and again,

we will unite in our grief, judging

her much less than we did the bad

sister. This time it was not

our sister's fault. This time

it could have happened to any

of us and in a way it did. We'll

know she wasn't the only

sister to suffer. We all suffer

with our choices, and we

all have our choice of sisters.

My sisters will seem like a bunch

of alternate me, all the ways

I could have gone. I could see

how things pan out without

having to do the things myself.

The abortions, the divorces,

the arson, swindles, poison jelly.

But who could say they weren't

myself, we are so close. I mean,

who can tell the difference?

I could choose to be a fisherman's

wife since I'd be able to visit

my sister in her mansion, sipping

bubbly for once, braying

to the others who weren't invited.

I could be a traveler, a seer,

a poet, a potter, a flyswatter.

None of those choices would be

as desperate as they seem now.

My life would be like one finger

on a hand, a beautiful, usable, ringed,

wrung, piano-and-dishpan hand.

There would be both more and less

of me to have to bear. None of us

would be forced to be stronger

than we could be. Each of us could

be all of us. The pretty one.

The smart one. The bitter one.

The unaccountably-happy-

for-no-reason one. I could be,

for example, the hopeless

one, and the next day my sister

would take my place, and I would

hold her up until my arms gave way

and another sister would relieve me.

If only you'd been a better mother.

How could I have been a better mother?

I would have needed a better self,

and that is a gift I never received.

So you're saying it's someone else's fault?

The gift of having had a better mother myself,

my own mother having had a better mother herself.

The gift that keeps on not being given.

Who was supposed to give it?

How am I supposed to know?

Well, how am I supposed to live?

I suppose you must live as if you had been

given better to live with. Comb your hair, for instance.

I cut off my hair, to sell for the money

to buy you what you wanted.

I wanted nothing but your happiness.

I can't give you that!

What would Jesus do?

He had a weird mother too…

Use the myrrh, the frankincense, as if

it were given unconditionally, your birthright.

It's a riddle.

All gifts are a riddle, all lives are

in the middle of mother-lives.

But it's always winter in this world.

There is no end to ending.

The season of giving, the season

when the bears are never cold,

because they are sleeping.

The bears are never cold, Mama,

but I am one cold, cold bear.

They could have been anyone,

no one special. I didn't need

them to be angels or stars.

But to me, they were a boy

and twin girls. Like ink soaking

through from the other side

of the page I write on now,

they form no images, no story.

A crack in the wall admitted

no spider, no draft, but only

because there was no wall.

Often, as a child, when I did

something wrong and got away

with it, I thought a ghost

or spirit or a kind of assistant

god (not the Real God, who was

too busy for the souls of children

and it turns out that is true)

would bleed through to me

from the skin of the other world,

cut by my misdeed or sin,

and catch me. I wanted to be seen,

known for what I truly was:

a bad child, unlike the perfect

water children I would never have

the chance to know.

for Mark and Paul

1

When the mind walks without language,

there is no boardwalk; there is no Board;

there is no boredom; and there are no feet,

legs or yards, coin or meter. No measure,

no miles. What is freedom if not freedom

from distance? From speaking lines?

2

The leaves, little green lamps for the sunblind.

3

Blue fingertips. Could mean a beach-party

manicure or a corpse. Or:
and
a corpse.

To be touched intimately by blue fingertips.

To put it more bluntly: to be fingered

by the pool in which you drown.

4

Why not sparkle if given a choice and you've

had enough sleep? Why not give back

a tiny grain of what you've been given from

night's endlessness and guaranteed breathing?

I have fractured only so minute a corner

of the deadest, most useless bone in the sky's

body, how can I not make a kite of it?

How can I keep even the broken glass

to myself, drinking nothing out of nothing?

5

To swim is to let god know you won't take it

lying down nor will you just lie down and take it.

6

Solemn toes respond directly even to the most

frivolous mind. What other rules but bent

rules? Can I love you from the other

side of the conversation? From the other side

of the brown-feathered space of the table?

Of the living, eaten egg and sunrise and sleep-

eyes wet from night?

7

The tiny grain of sand in the eye. The single

flap that lands the bird into the lonely next,

the only nest in the sea. The glimmer that

proves contact has been made. Dear child,

wild sea, closed eye. Far, loving air.

8

Walking in the sand—am I under the sun

or dangling over it, first by one foot

and then the other?

9

This cerulean weather and its yellow talons.

The afternoon on the brink of drink. My ears

are plugged with wax and seawater, utterly

corked. The light has to widen to include

the music I can't hear. I am hoping the god

of catastrophe—barbecue, lightning, riptide—

has smarter fish to fry. Suddenly the scruffy

deer appears, as it often does in poems, a dark-

eyed child dreaming in a dream.

10

Where oh where is that
one leaf?

Though I am well,

and deep, and fall asleep well,

I am not the wisher that I am.

I think that just thinking about

lighting the way and lighting

a match are the same thing,

is the same thing as doing either.

With both hands the same thing

and that thing is me. But it's

all the time, every day. But no.

It's not for me to say.

It's not heatlight's way to have

me in heatlight's way saying

no light today or heat will pay.

When golden oak leaves, real

gold, real leaf, flaked thickly

all over my wonderful dull self

with a gleam like fresh paper

what did the old boulder say,

in a waste of words?

“Some kind of freak lives next door,

a fish-striped alien

on an earplug binge who simply

will not acknowledge she's being

called home.” Home! Home!

But nobody's called me, nobody's

home. There isn't even a phone.

Perhaps I'll start working alone,

on two separate films,

enrobed in a copycat

body, a leaping projection,

for isn't that what we do?

Leap. A larger footprint

than creature. An aluminum

filling doubling as a bulletproof

vest that's been tested

as a way out through the window.

The window of curved mirror,

of salt, the window of it all,

the latched feeling,

to quit patching the baby,

for example (did you know

there was a baby? You'd think

he'd be mentioned by now,

but the things I choose not to say

might keep you wondering to the end

of the page, the fat page, the fat

unmentionable this and that),

onto the habit of the baby.

Where is the quilt? The boulder-

edged quilt. The one used for Earth

Day. The stained, strange,

fleshlike quilt, fortress, green-feared,

many-colored dress.

It was my costume,

it was my stained-red pink thing

all last year. It was my rag doll

concubine shrink honey

girlfriend hag that I had to have

at home or I wouldn't go home.

If my wish is anything more

than a graft, a draft,

a cover, ten thousand lovers

in the space of one, then I will take

all three: these wishes: baby,

body, poem. Or body, hobby,

bone. And make them as true

as a genie can make them come.

True as a field in lamplight,

as a stone believing it's all alone.

With my wishes I can kill them

twice, and still get them back:

maybe, body, prone.

Unbelievable that it is still today.

How much more of it is left?

How much more of tomorrow?

I am not greedy. I ask because

I hope for less than I have coming.

I am not more than I hoped

to be in my prayers

in my girlhood, in my bonfire.

Not in my ungodly unuttered

then-ness. If that old boulder

ever lived a day with any burden

but itself then I will lift its hard-

meat to a place of honor.

Super-polished on the very top

of the world's biggest root.

I am not ungrateful. I will face

the stranger's face in any light

from any lamp or lucky gold

three-wish thing. I will not

wish for two things and then use

the third wish for three more.

I won't take more than I have,

and I don't have to want

what I already have from before.

It's too quiet and sorry to want,

and the place of wanting is too sore

to stuff it with hard rock,

hard luck, or it's too far back

to even see the stuff anymore.

I'm open. I'm old. I just want

the wishing to go back home

or to send me back, in its place,

to where the giving is given out.