He knows we uproot burdock
and hack down the musky trees of heaven.
He knows we kill mosquitoes,
but spare the killer spiders. He knows
how cats and opossums look
when they get run over: slick loops
of veined intestines, bulged eyes
and choked-out tongues. He knows
the living die, but do not want to die:
worm tugged thin from dirt to bird;
hooked fish muscling for the water;
scared pig scuffing against the ramp.
He knows we humans die, and kill
our own. He knows what soldiers are,
what warplanes do. He is four
and he also knows numbers:
a hundred and twenty-five pounds,
his mother. Sixty minutes, one long hour.
Three million people, the city of Chicago.
He’s four, and lately wants to know wars:
“Tell me a war, Daddy.” I name one,
and he wants the number of people killed.
The Civil War: six hundred thousand.
“Is that more than a thousand?
Can you count that many? Tell me
another war.” And another. He pays
attention. Vietnam: more than two million.
World War Two: at least forty million.
“That’s a lot, isn’t it?” Later he’ll ask, “Why?”
and we’ll talk about money, land, hate,
and following orders, but right now
all he wants is the name of a war
and the numbers of the killed—numbers
so vast you couldn’t count them
in a single lifetime, like the number
to tally earth’s weight—a number he loves
to tell and tell: six point six sextillion tons.
tidal women splay tempera
the conch pigmented against turquoise waters
her body sea-bound in paint and bone
she wears herself in brush strokes
zephyr and aura blow embryonic seawater from her shoulders
spring’s hora rushes to mantle her newborn curves
renaissanced she crashes borders architected
as venetian lips she cannot speak through
her body imaginative
almost cadaverous
she speaks around
she gazes as she is gazed upon
her nakedness to nudity
now pornographic
now classical
her body tidal
father her your words
your chipped teeth
your plaster-rotted frescoes
in your marbled mausoleums
she speaks you back
I bring the watered-down wine to my mother’s lips
hold the plastic cup at an angle, tilt the straw.
Pleasures remain, and we practice them.
The body in water.
The anticipation of spring.
Hummingbirds.
Above the deck, a string of lights levitates
below the sunshade like a globed consciousness
working only in the night.
Below the deck—small animals,
bundles of rustling nerves.
How many worlds?
How many dimensions hiding
in our perceived walls? In the dark of summer
we watch insects give themselves to fire
and we take in my father’s stories with more wine,
more water. When it is time, we will rise together
on the homemade lift into the living
room. We will wheel down the hall and
my brother will cradle the arc of my mother
in his arms and lay her to sleep in bed.
This is the geometry of dying—
and our grief is a closed circle
concentric in its company but radiating
like the fire does, and the glass festoons do,
and as all light will, arriving
from anywhere and touching anything.
O, the starlight—
when moved by a turbulent atmosphere—
how it spreads.
After the opening of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
I’m thinking of humans who cut the testicles off other humans, who string up
their fellow humans and laugh. Of people who set other people alight for the crime of
uppity, for the crime of gay, for the crime of, I refuse. I’m worrying about
my fellow humans, who can hang a pregnant woman upside down, disembowel her,
leave the fetus dangling—
I’m thinking of the many loving humans I know. Sheltering humans. I’m worrying
about how many people after the war still thought Hitler’s big mistake was
not killing all the Jews. Wondering, too, about those who hid entire families in
a few small rooms, risking the murder of their own. How do we reconcile this—
the fervidly brave, the fervidly cruel. Happy informers. The disbelieving informed. Them
and Us. Who did this to you? I want to ask victim and perpetrator—
I want it to be someone’s fault: twisted leaders, bad parents, beatings.
Or maybe it’s a Darwinian experiment. Something coiled in our genes. Here are
the conditions: let’s see who lives, let’s see who fouls their soul. Either way,
I walk down the street with affable people who would do these things—dangle
suffocating humans from branches, drag them behind jouncing pickup trucks and laugh,
roast alive the very humans who maybe—in another life—they dearly love.
Is there a life in which I’m laughing along with them?
Tomorrow, my father gets his foot
cut off—too much pain for too long—
time for another divorce.
For years, he declared
he was too old for this.
Maybe he was too young.
What a shiver—sickness,
wheelchairs, walkers,
canes. There’s been talk
of complications,
of a cut above the knee—
like the hem on a sexy skirt.
But he will insist, he says,
on below the knee. March—
a bit of snow clings
to the ground, but in his garden
he’s planted spinach already.
By my front steps this morning,
the hyacinths just beginning
to bulge out of the ground
remind me of knees—
how green and incipient
we can always be.
Below the knee—
all the things
he has done,
has not done,
could do,
can still do,
on his knees.
Sleepless, I walk A1A, right down the middle, feeling the road warm under my bare feet. Street reflectors glow orange, like little matches that light the way. Waves crash, and a distant car echoes this way or a frog chimes, soft reminder I’m not alone. Sometimes I walk until the sun touches the horizon, and blue jays warm the air with lust. At home, he sleeps on his right, arms and legs curled around a pillow. Yesterday, he teased: How does it feel to want? Sometimes the moon is a gold thumbprint in the indigo above a dark ocean. Sometimes nothing more than a slice through sky. Sometimes stolen, gone with clouds thick as dreams.
My mother called
the antique mahogany dresser
that held her daughters’ underwear
in the hallway that ran
from her room to ours
a lowboy. On top of him,
she set an antique clock
that chimed every hour,
counting our lives for us.
At noon, I drank
in twelve bells, counting
ten on my fingers
and tapping my heart twice
with my pointer finger.
I was a child in love
with ritual but
I never questioned
my mother’s—to house
her three daughters’
multi-colored snake pit
of lace and satin and cotton
in the same wooden box,
stored where other mothers
treasured silver knives,
miniature spoons, and linen
they knew how to fold
into birds that posed on bone
china plates as men took
their seats at fancy tables.
Ours was a blurry childhood.
Our mother did not believe
in separating the strands of anything—
she threw every kind of utensil
into one empty, unlined
kitchen drawer. Her necklaces
struggled in a level of tangle
she’d never live to undo. We got lost
in the spice cabinet, could never
find the flavors we craved most
and our water would boil over, stain
the black sheen of the stovetop
as our books leaned against each other
in a confusion of genre. Surely
our illustrated Cinderella yearned to pry open
the pages of my mother’s art books
where women spread their legs, refused
to don lingerie. My mother hurled
her apprentices’ unmentionables
into a place that reeked of a forest
before it’s been selected and sliced
by the town’s strongest men.
We idolized her, but questioned
what life was like at other houses
where dinner parties twinkled
as we watched them, barefoot
from the street with our hair matted
into braids from the previous week.
The plates and saucers soared
to each guest like clockwork
as they gripped their forks,
licked their lips and leaned back.
Perhaps every woman in our house
was jealous of each white,
monogrammed linen cloth,
how it rested gently
in the warm lap of a man,
how it got to be lifted
by experienced hands
toward his hungry mouth.
It never occurred to me that anyone would know me like I know myself.
The first time a boy put his tongue between my thighs
was on a wooden picnic table. It was Sunday. Broad daylight. I was
splinterless on his father’s boat as that boy named after metal,
named after taking without someone’s knowledge,
ferried me gorgeously out to an unnamed island he knew would be deserted.
I plunged the steel anchor into the crest of the shore and our bodies broke
away from the boat, leaping into the dunes where we lapped salt water
off each other until we were dry again. We hid behind palm fronds like
the ones laid before Jesus as he rode to his crucifixion. It was exhilarating
to be laid gently on a wooden altar. I turned my head and studied
a circle of gray stones where ash danced, flitted away from where
a fire once roared. Sizzled. I wanted to burn, so I covered my eyes
with my hands to shield the light. I don’t remember either of us praying.
for Chelsea
The tulips have flowered too early.
I cover the beds in white sheets
to keep them warm.
Frost pulled down from the stars
will soften
into a remembering
by morning. I am no mother
to the flowers or anyone.
It’s spring
and the world feels more delicate
than before.
Winter clipped. New wings lifting.
Doves adoring the sound
of their own song.
I have been told
some plants bloom once then die.
Flight is the answer,
though water can be an answer too.
Everybody (body) a vanishing act.
Seed without root.
And now the petals fall,
wishes to love
and love-me-not.
And now, the sound of distant laughter
enters my open window,
like ghosts. Softer now,
gentle weight of these small bones.
in honor of International Women’s Day, March 8, 2020
The memory buzzes under
my skin like neon—in my young
twenties, before I understood
my daily risk of harassment
and humiliation, before I had
grievances, before I knew I was
entitled to grievances, I was
at the gynecologist, wrapped
in a johnny, lying down
on the examining table
for my first such exam,
knowing in the observing part
of my brain that a nurse
was supposed to be with me,
afraid of what the doctor
might find, and he entered
the room friendly, an older man,
asked me a few questions,
and then commanded, slide on
down here, Margot. I’m gonna
fill you full of cold steel.
Part of me has always wanted
the world to shake every morning,
just so I felt alive. Only minor tremors,
of course, nothing elaborate. A fallen
fence maybe, or a few globs of fruit
dropping in the field. That way I’d know
daylight again. I could feel it. I could
draw the blinds and run my hands along
a cracked window pane—that slice of life
that makes across the glass a flowing river.
Outside, the parking lot could fold a little,
ripple like a cornfield in Kansas. One streetlight,
every morning, could crash into the street,
that’s all. And listen, don’t get me wrong.
I don’t want pain or loss or the crumbling of
city hall. I only want a modest nudge to say
hello. I want to know the world is here,
and so am I. Yes, so am I.