Have you seen these
Slight bones of mine?
Riddled and porous with disease
You may think of them as
Well buried treasure,
(I'm sure that even the worms wait with bated breath!)
I may be pieced together with
pins, screws
Even staples in places
But I'll tell you something about this broken body :
I have stolen the mantle of Atlas,
And granted Sisyphus leave from his labours
And you
You look at me as though the weight of your discomfort alone should knock me over.
At last, no rage
At dying light,
For restless futures, no more fight
The world has won:
I set it free
I've signed the forms
I am at peace.
And in the end, you
Embraced me like an old friend you hadn't seen since college
You'd touched my arm twice
It was awkward, but it felt good
For once, to touch another heart's blood
Heart's skin, and when
At 86th Street
We said farewell
I watched you descend into
The bloodstream of the city
Emptied, I wondered the
Aisles of CVS
Bought unnecessary mascara
And eyelash serum
And then sent you
My accurate shadow
To keep.
Floating over leaden feet out from hospital halls
An automaton. Your jeans, and bra
Crumpled into the bottom of a white, plastic bag
I felt like I carried your sad body in that bag,
I moved— not quite walking
Head down hung mouthed
Fallen faced in crowds
I needed the world to see that I was broken.
"There's something to be said for widow's wear" someone told me,
And so I wore your last breath like a black veil
Over everything I touched
And allowed the discomfort
Of waitresses and taxi drivers
To lie across my body like
Grey assuagement.
If only it were permissable
To beg you to fill me with yourself
Obliterate this barrenness
Eventhough, I've no ready-made future on which to sell you
I recognise the request is preposterous
Offensive even, but look
These are my hands
Aching Empty and
This is my mouth
Alike In want
My pockets as well are now empty—
I bring nothing from before
The stones with which I had
Filled them have all been
Repatriated
And I am here, ready to share
Their mean country
Won't you pluck me from this dust
Set me upon your cool mantle
Amongst your candles
Dried hydrangea
And special things?
At three-and-a-half, a surgeon's knife
Carved my future from my belly
That was the first I learned that even
My body is not mine.
At eight, alone, I staked my claim
When I opened my wrists like early birthday presents.
I
To hell with your false bravado
Your obligatory resilience, it bores me to death
Show me instead, your
Injuries, your
Soft open hand
Show me the stubbornness of your trust
And I will open to you like a tasty wound.
II
A broken bone, improperly healed
Must be broken again to reset correctly
I break myself open
One hundred times a day
I'll never heal correctly—
I make certain of it.
This is my demonstration
Against your bootstrap imperative
I hoisted my sign the first time at thirteen, lying half
conscious beneath the
Head cheerleader's mother's wheel
They said I might lose the foot, but
Instead, I gained a gentle new thing
Softness, it turns out, can be stubborn too.
III
Each time I think of your last days in that horrible bed
I'm haunted by your
Swollen blue hands
Toward the end, they'd tied them down so that you couldn't
extubate yourself.
The finality came, your stone hand in mine, I watched your chest heave
Artificially
Long after the screen told me that your heart had stopped.
17.01.2023
We who subsist, one foot in the ground are
Powerful growers; our
Branches might even blot out your sun,
Steal its harsh light to feed our own
Leaves. Forgive me, please, for this brief narcissism
Will you now hate me for my admission?
Suicide is a drug, and I
Am addicted
Each dose fixed slightly less carefully than the last
I watch my own ritual, over
And over
One day I'll drift off into the sweet sleep of overdose
I imagine the elements of my life as detritus—
the granny cart that was Carrie's "from the Queens days", with one wheel now held on by a corrupted bobbypin
My brass flask
(Will it be discovered empty, containing only the vague scent of brandy?)
Will the unopened bottle of Chanel N°5 in the back of the fridge
Find a new neck to perfume?
Will the thousands of books that crowd my apartment find their own lonely tomb, or
Will they live again?
I miss smoking.
Well, why shouldn't I? What's the use in abstinence now? This crass charade that
If we behave virtuously, we can live forever? No thank you.
I imagine myself as a memory
Or a cautionary tale—
"Poets almost never end up happily, become a plumber, instead!"
Suicide is a drug, and I am addicted
This taste of sweet freedom the tongue can never forget.
What better thing could there be than to be
That soft spot where you might land
When all the worlds—
both inside and out
have assailed you with calloused hands?
It's day again.
Awakeness again.
This brash returning to me
I'm never ready.
My angry, growling neighbour is shouting and slamming doors again
The wall between our apartments shakes
A raucous chorus of sostenuto horns break through my thin windows again—
Other exasperated people I'd never ordinarily have to know are stuck in traffic on some impassable block
And now I know them
I know them too well
It's intimate
My tired body has been penetrated by someone else's impatience again
But now, the buzzer sounds–
FedEx is here again
My phone rings,
It's Citibank again
There's no time for a gentle awakening
No time to meet the day slowly, on softened feet
The things that others
Seem to accept as a precondition of the world
Assail me
Day is an impatient dog with unkempt claws
Scratching up my tender legs.
Apparently, I missed my morning pills (which include my prozac)
Everyday this week until today.
Last night, I was feeling so close to giving in, that
When I came home from my doctor's appointment, I downed half a bottle of brandy the moment I'd dropped my purse on the sideboard
Harm reduction
My doctor is doubling my dose
I suppose it would help more if I remember to take it
Yesterday was also my final session with a grief counselor
I was allotted eight
Eight forty-five minute sessions
Spread out over nine weeks
For the loss of my love
Of eighteen years
Yesterday was hard
I almost went looking for my cache
Today, so far is slightly easier; I don't trust it.
Sometimes the killer is inside the house
When mine gets bored, he stands over me with ultimatums:
Poetry or pills?
Be wary, I guess, if ever I go silent.
Never have I swum in gentle creeks
Only torrents wild, arroyos, shallow and quick to anger have bathed me
I drowned a hundred times before I was three
That was the summer of my surgery
Recovering, my mother placed a donut for me on her dresser—
Pink frosting with sprinkles on a blue and white plate
If I wanted it, I'd have to get up from their expansive green bed and walk
Seven feet
Cross the ochre, shag carpet
Heavy guts tumbling out from fresh, red and yellow sutures.
Some mornings
Like this morning
As slowly I rise, a phoenix from sleep
I forget that I'm alone in my bed, I dream
A partner who's impatiently awaiting her coffee
A dog who needs me to let him out to pee
A mother I have to call
Even a mythical kitten enthralled
Hunting invisible bugs on the wall
When finally, I catch up to reality
It's a shock; I go through
All my recent losses
And the grief begins anew.
11.01.2023 I
Suspiciously, slightly less suicidal this morning
Though I've learned to mistrust this absence of drive
That old and comforting, familiar friend; I've known her since I was eight: the first time
I opened my wrists on that rust pitted blade broken
Off from a red, plastic pencil sharpener.
She's kept me company through my darkest epochs, some lasting days or weeks, or years. Even decades.
She's only ever an aching palm away
Close as my own fingerprints.
Maybe she's just gone out for groceries.
Maybe she's off on holiday. She rarely says when she's leaving or
For how long she'll be away
However, kind friend that she is, she knows just how to anticipate my need for her; something
Happens and Bang! she's right beside me once again.
How often I want to ask you
Could you love me
Could you do
What I need you to do?
Could you stand beside me while I dance this daily danse macabre
Could you abide me even as I rob
From you your afternoon light?
The hydrangea with which I've bedecked my mantle
Arrived already dead
Not wilted but crisp and warm brown in their winter sleep
A bit like me
This "elegant skeleton" who
Stands here before you, still
Possessed of beauty in my place between the worlds, asking
Could you love me? Could you
Love me loving you? Could you
Tend to my grave after I've passed through?
Could you adore this thing that insists to cling
To sides of cliffs
Stubborn goat
Who- all too aware the narrow ground is
Even now crumbling beneath her cloven hooves?
Who refuses her place in the Ridiculous parade for
Those vainglorious warriors who maintain
Some futile hope against entropy—
Could you love me?
Could you accept me loving you?
Could you even
Dance with me, or simply bang the
Timpani while I do what I do?
Diminished by your loss,
Only slightly there
I hang on by a gold locket of your silver hair
Or a whiff of mysteriously perfumed air–
Egyptian musk, that
Haunts the small hall
Outside our room—
Is that you? Are you there?
Why won't you come in, wrap around me again?
I don't understand,
Are you there? Are you aware? Or
Are you no spectre at all? Only air?
If I go on to find you will I too dissapear:
A collection of recollections
A cautionary tale? An occasional whiff of Chanel N°5
Which no one but you would attach meaning to?
"Old Lady Perfume" you called it
And you were right
I am older than the dirt that covers your white
Coffin, on whose lid I left my
Red lip mark
One last joke whose punchline will hang over you forever.
You hated to kiss me when I was wearing lipstick
I loved to torture you
That same way.
"Blech! Blech!" You'd swipe at your lips by back of hand.
This image, more than any other I fold into a small square
And tuck it neatly inside my brassiere.
The hydrangea corpses hang on in my winter garden
Still beautiful in death
Elegant skeletons
We have something in common I suppose
I still receive compliments although I too am dead.
Still,
Nobody picks my brown blooms for their mantle.
My life stretches out behind me
Like a rat's tail; I cannot shake it.
Before me, an interminably high and broad
Wall: solid and grey as slate.
No way over or around it,
Only thing is to join with it:
Become carbon again!
Compost compressed
Time immemorial
What a wonderful word:
Im. Em. Orial.
Time will not remember me,
Will not recall my soft thoughts or deeds— they'll dissolve
Along with my flesh; my
Cheeks and breasts,
Belly and thighs, a
Delicious repast for the
Microbes and mites
Calcium will be the final discernable element— the only fossil or record of me.
How wonderful to become
That wall before me.
The vile of green sticks, and the
Bottle of flat, white
Pills scare me. Too easily swallowed with a glass of brandy
Impossible to forget, and far too handy.
They wait me out, just out of sight
I count them out on Friday nights
Twenty-six green, and
thirty-eight white.
I've always been a little in
Love with death;
She's gently teased from my first glimpse of light
"Come hither to safety you tired, wary babe,
Come rest your head upon my breast."
She is mother, father, and lover as well–
Even as she claims each for her own.
Oh death, how your great, broad
Curling arms call me
To lay myself down by the roots of trees;
How your promise of safe, and dreamless sleep warms me
Even as I in your cutting wake freeze.
My eyes are so much worse than they were even nine months ago;
the last time I had a vision exam.
I've had surgery since then, for a detaching retina.
It's made little difference. I
Still see the strange, bright white flashes of light
I still can't read the cable guide
In fact,
I'm having so much trouble reading much of anything.
I went today into Cohen Optical to
Ask about a new vision exam
A new pair of glasses, explain how the old ones are
Worse than nothing at all.
"You'll have to wait until April" she tells me, either that or
Pay out of pocket.
Five hundred dollars, minimum it turns out.
I'll wait.
Just three more months.
After all, I barely drive anymore
And who needs to read, anyway?
Maurice has a hernia.
He lifts te many layers of his sweatshirts to show me.
"That looks painful" I grimace
"It don't hurt. If it don't go away in Febyooary, they gonna take care of it in March."
We talk about the dangers of surgical mesh ; I decide not to tell him how it slowly murdered my mother over 24 years.
He asks me if I'm married. I decide not to tell him I'm a widow.
As I'm getting up from the bus bench to leave, he asks me for a hug. There are giant, gloppy tears falling from his right eye.
I hug him twice per his request.
He asks if he can squeeze my ass.
He asks me if I'll be his friend.
But he wants more from me than I have to give
Even to myself.
The world can't sustain its interest in tragedies.
Past the point of titillation, beyond the opportunity for heroism, where chosen responsability and hopelessness collide
Lies irrevocable fatigue.
I must be very tiring.
(I exhaust myself.)
I feel myself becoming a forgone conclusion.
It's a comfort
Of sorts. The circle grows smaller.
I'll spill my guts until they
All slip away on the offal mess.
It's a leak that no
Matter how I try,
I cannot seem to plug.
The candle upon my yellow table
Why won't its flame stay still, and calm?
There's no swift current of air passing over it
Instead, too aware of its vanishing dawn
It gambols, it bounds,
Awild
Unrestrained
A polyphony! Its internal law.
What can we learn from poor
Unica Zürn
Anne Sexton
And Sylvia Plath?
That being a poetess is bad for one's health!
Homecoming is a predatory, corpulent child
Not patient to wait 'til I've undressed and eaten
But pounces upon my tired, sore back
Shouting "giddyap, giddyap, giddyap!"
When Emily Dickinson wrote of
"Hope",
As "a thing with feathers that perches in the soul",
She neglected to mention its terrible beak
And talons for tearing into the weak
Hope is no gentle, cooing dove,
But a hungry and treacherous beast from above.
This pain behind my collarbone that
Snatches away my breath
Comes sharp, un-preannounced
A rather indelicate guest
Who I'll invite to stay nevertheless
Such pain is only comfort
As from a workman's calloused hands
I will not make him leave
Regardless of the requests
Of all my other snooty guests.
When I– relieved
Go on to join
The tree roots, and weeds, I
Do not go clean or white as a bleached bone
But silted and sooted and properly burned
For losing my world has left its scorch inside me.
Nothing is ever wasted;
there's nary a thing as waste:
Whether a meal for entropy, growth, or mirth, or the
Hungry worms that till the earth.
Somewhere across the concrete yard that gives
Pause 'tween the teeth of my Yorkville block
Someone is beating a nail into wood
Tap, tap, bang
Hammer nail two by four
Monotone marimba
Unfortunate concerto
And I– I linger in bed
'gainst open window cold
Covers yanked up
Around my bare breasts
Whilst an impatient January morning
Circles like a wolf
Eager for a fallen scrap of meat.
This dreadful thing, this
Opening to consciousness, to
Light and
Consequence
And hope
The latter of course, the most treacherous of them all.
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