Plundered Hearts (15 page)

The reasons are both remote and parallel.

    The primitive impulse was to join,

The modern to detach oneself from, the world.

    The hunter’s shadowy camouflage,

The pubescent girl’s fertility token,

    The warrior’s lurid coat of mail,

The believer’s entrée to the afterlife—

    The spiritual practicality

Of our ancestors remains a source of pride.

    Yielding to sentimentality,

Later initiates seek to dramatize

    Their jingoism, their Juliets

Or Romeos. They want to fix a moment,

    Some port of call, a hot one-night-stand,

A rush of mother-love or Satan worship.

    Superstition prompts the open eye

On the sailor’s lid, the fish on his ankle.

    The biker makes a leather jacket

Of his soft beer belly and nail-bitten hands.

    The call girl’s strategic butterfly

Or calla lily attracts and focuses

    Her client’s interest and credit card.

But whether encoded or flaunted, there’s death

    At the bottom of every tattoo.

The mark of Cain, the stigma to protect him

    From the enemy he’d created,

Must have been a skull. Once incorporated,

    Its spell is broken, its mortal grip

Loosened or laughed at or fearlessly faced down.

    A Donald Duck with drooping forelock

And swastikas for eyes, the sci-fi dragon,

    The amazon’s ogress, the mazy

Yin-yang dragnets, the spiders on barbed-wire webs,

    The talismanic fangs and jesters,

Ankhs and salamanders, scorpions and dice,

    All are meant to soothe the savage breast

Or back beneath whose dyed flesh there beats something

    That will stop. Better never to be

Naked again than not disguise what time will

    Press like a flower in its notebook,

Will score and splotch, rot, erode, and finish off.

    Ugly heads are raised against our end.

If others are unnerved, why not death itself?

    If unique, then why not immortal?

Protected by totem animals that perch

    Or coil in strategic locations—

A lizard just behind the ear, a tiger’s

    Fangs seeming to rip open the chest,

An eagle spreading its wings across the back—

    The body at once both draws death down

And threatens its dominion. The pain endured

    To thwart the greater pain is nothing

Next to the notion of nothingness.

    Is that what I see in the mirror?

The vacancy of everything behind me,

    The eye that now takes so little in,

The unmarked skin, the soul without privileges …

    Everything’s exposed to no purpose.

The tears leave no trace of their grief on my face.

    My gifts are never packaged, never

Teasingly postponed by the need to undo

    The puzzled perfections of surface.

All over I am open to whatever

    You may make of me, and death soon will,

Its unmarked grave the shape of things to come,

    The page there was no time to write on.

Because he was the chieftain’s eldest son

                         And so himself

               Destined one day to rule,

The great meetinghouse was garishly strung

               With smoked heads and armfuls

Of flax, the kiwi cloak, the lithograph

Of Queen Victoria, seated and stiff,

Oil lamps, the greenstone clubs and treasure box

                         Carved with demons

               In polished attitudes

That held the tribal feathers and ear drops.

               Kettles of fern root, stewed

Dog, mulberry, crayfish, and yam were hung

To wait over the fire’s spluttering tongues.

The boy was led in. It was the last day

                         Of his ordeal.

               The tenderest sections—

Under his eyes, inside his ears—remained

               To be cut, the maze run

To its dizzying ends, a waterwheel

Lapping his flesh the better to reveal

Its false-face of unchanging hostility.

                         A feeding tube

               Was put between his lips.

His arms and legs were held down forcibly.

               Resin and lichen, mixed

With pigeon fat and burnt to soot, was scooped

Into mussel shells. The women withdrew.

By then the boy had slowly turned his head,

                         Whether to watch

               Them leave or keep his eye

On the stooped, grayhaired cutter who was led

               In amidst the men’s cries

Of ceremonial anger at each

Of the night’s cloudless hours on its path

Through the boy’s life. The cutter knelt beside

                         The boy and stroked

               The new scars, the smooth skin.

From his set of whalebone chisels he tied

               The shortest one with thin

Leather thongs to a wooden handle soaked

In rancid oil. Only his trembling throat

Betrayed the boy. The cutter smiled and took

                         A small mallet,

               Laid the chisel along

The cheekbone, and tapped so a sharpness struck

               The skin like a bygone

Memory of other pain, other threats.

Someone dabbed at the blood. Someone else led

A growling chant about their ancestors.

                         Beside the eye’s

               Spongy marshland a frond

Sprouted, a jagged gash to which occurs

               A symmetrical form,

While another chisel pecks in the dye,

A blue the deep furrow intensifies.

The boy’s eyes are fluttering now, rolling

                         Back in his head.

               The cutter stops only

To loop the blade into a spiralling,

               Astringent filigree

Whose swollen tracery, it seems, has led

The boy beyond the living and the dead.

He can feel the nine Nothings drift past him

                         In the dark: Night,

               The Great Night, the Choking

Night, the All-Brightening Night and the Dim,

               The Long Night, the Floating

Night, the Empty Night, and with the first light

A surging called the War Canoe of Night—

Which carries Sky Father and Earth Mother,

                         Their six sons borne

               Inside the airless black

The two make, clasped only to each other.

               Turning onto his back,

The eldest son struggles with all his force,

Shoulder to sky, straining until it’s torn

Violently away from the bleeding earth.

                         He sets four beams,

               Named for the winds, to keep

His parents apart. They’re weeping, the curve

               Of loneliness complete

Between them now. The old father’s tears gleam

Like stars, then fall as aimlessly as dreams

To earth, which waits for them all to return.

                         Hers is the care

               Of the dead, and his tears

Seep into her folds like a dye that burns.

               One last huge drop appears

Hanging over the boy’s head. Wincing, scared,

He’s put his hand up into the cold air.

The villa’s switchback garden path,

between the potted railing and the sea

and under the canopy of overlapping pines,

winds through what can grow under them:

plants from a moon orbiting Venus maybe,

brambly fig, yucca, holm oak, firethorn,

and silvery, bloated succulents—

The Penitent, Dead-Child’s-Fingers,

Mother’s-Stool, Chapel-of-Solitude.

The agave beside the stone bench,

where I have sat heavily all day,

reaches out in all directions,

its meaty, grizzled leaves each

the length of a man, each edged

with back-turned venomous thorns,

thumbnail billhooks in ranks down

from the empurpled spike at its tip.

The largest leaf, right next to me,

has so bent under itself, the spike

has come around and gone up through

another part of itself—the heart, say,

or whatever comes to as much as that.

Yesterday the gardener told me

it could take thirty years for the spike

slowly—never meaning to, thinking

it was headed toward the water-glare

it mistook for the little light that kept

not coming from above—slowly

to pierce its own flesh, to sink its sorrow

deep within and through its own life.

It only took me a month.

The fever has lasted three days.

Layers of skins and weavings

were first heaped on the bed

but nothing kept out the cold

that shook my body

like a crackhead mother

angry because her baby

won’t stop crying.

Then another body crawled in

beside me, held me—

she throws the blue baby

down the furnace chute,

the ceiling hisses at

the ice pack’s beaded apathy,

the hidden air, the voices,

the voices all too calm.

I’m hauled up, they listen

to my back. What can it say?

They listen to my front.

A deep breath. Does this hurt?

So much I can’t answer.

They ease me back down.

The one beside me slips away.

I can hear him in the next room.

He’s laughing. He’s given up.

This is how love feels, they write.

So which one am I in love with?

In those days I used to refuse the medicine

because the infection then made it hurt so

when I came, hurt so that the pain—

its intolerable scalding contractions,

the knot choked by appetite, desperate

to advance and retreat, to thrash further

inside its own swollen sentence,

the little useless gash, the bitter spasm—

each night left me frightened and smiling.

The tears had rinsed my eyes, the whining

stilled any desire to repeat myself.

I thought of it as a kind of mutilation,

less of my body than of my longing not to have one.

Afterwards, I would limp to the bathroom

for a hot washcloth and hold it to myself,

and then to my face. The cloth smelled

of the rotten hyacinths, their stalks snapped,

their milky petals gone brown and sticky,

I would pass each weekend, thrown to the back

of the stalls, pots of them, at the flower market.

I went to the window, put the cloth on the stone

ledge. Until it dried, it would be my standard,

my scorn and seamark, my flag of surrender.

Down the street, on the path to the oratory,

the stations of the cross—huge bronze slabs,

their ordinary agonies modernized to poses

on a fashion runway—have been wired shut.

A river of swallows sheers off course again

around air-locked spurs of warmth or chill.

The sun is out late, panning for gold

in the silt of our ochre upper floors.

Everything is looking up for a change.

Isn’t that white capsule on the blue tablecloth

the daily jumbo jet? It’s so far beyond

the cross and thorns, beyond the drawstring

of birds, beyond the last light down here.

And there’s already a glass of water on the table,

for the pill I was meant to take hours ago.

My empty bookcase yawns and rises

from its paint job, white asphalt

newly laid over a grid of back streets,

the chill of what assurance supports it all

still in the air, no music, no voices.

Who wants to live with what he knows?

While I sit on the storage boxes,

my double’s slowly making his way

among shop windows and bloody altars,

holding pages to the light, changing

sex to distance himself from force

or faithfulness, the household demons.

It’s late. Opportunities are multiplying.

I am what I did? I am what I wait for?

I feel something returning, like a book

put back on the shelf, slid between

names like mine, my story, my fault.

The saxophonist winds up “My Romance,”

the song with a scar. In the red lacquer ceiling,

the night’s raw throat, I can just make out

lampshades the color of a smoker’s breath.

One is at our table. Across sits a woman

in tiny furs from before the war, the mouth

of one gnawing on the tail of the other,

like comets. A sudden brightness onstage,

a flaring spot, flashes on the nodding brass.

The little thud at a nova’s heart predicts

the gradual, dimming ebb and flow

of light—or love—soon enough burnt out,

remembered only as desire’s afterglow.

So which one has the room key? Neither of us

wants to guess what won’t ever be opened.

Something is found in a galactic pocket.

Something is left behind on a chair.

The elevator doors close soundlessly.

A constellation of numbers rises in order.

Again, the argument from design’s invoked.

Tomorrow we’ll get to go back over it all,

what’s partially false and almost always true,

as in “My romance doesn’t need a thing but you.”