Becoming Light (7 page)

Secretly, slowly in the dark,

it put out grub-white roots

which filled a jelly jar.

From this unlikely start,

an avocado tree with bark

& dark green leaves

shaded the green silk couch

which shaded me

throughout my shady adolescence.

There, beneath that tree

my skirt gave birth to hands!

Oh memorable hands of boys

with blacked-out eyes

like culprits

in the
National Enquirer.

My mother nursed that tree

like all her children,

turned it around so often

towards the sun

that its trunk grew twisted

as an old riverbed,

& despite its gaudy leaves

it never bore

fruit.

4

Cantaloupes: the setting sun at Paestum

slashed by rosy columns.

5

I am thinking of the onion again, with its two O mouths, like the gaping holes in nobody. Of the outer skin, pinkish brown, peeled to reveal a greenish sphere, bald as a dead planet, glib as glass, & an odor almost animal. I consider its ability to draw tears, its capacity for self-scrutiny, flaying itself away, layer on layer, in search of its heart which is simply another region of skin, but deeper & greener. I remember Peer Gynt. I consider its sometimes double heart. Then I think of despair when the onion searches its soul & finds only its various skins; & I think of the dried tuft of roots leading nowhere & the parched umbilicus, lopped off in the garden. Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest, self-effacing vegetable, questioning, introspective, peeling itself away, or merely radiating halos like lake ripples. I consider it the eternal outsider, the middle child, the sad analysand of the vegetable kingdom. Glorified only in France (otherwise silent sustainer of soups & stews), unloved for itself alone—no wonder it draws our tears! Then I think again how the outer peel resembles paper, how soul & skin merge into one, how each peeling strips bare a heart which in turn turns skin…

6

A poet in a world without onions,

in a world without apples

regards the earth as a great fruit.

Far off, galaxies glitter like currants.

The whole edible universe drops

to his watering mouth…

Think of generations of mystics

salivating for the fruit of god,

of poets yearning to inhabit apples,

of the sea, that dark fruit,

closing much more quickly than a wound,

of the nameless galaxies of astronomers,

hoping that the cosmos will ripen

& their eyes will become tongues…

7

For the taste of the fruit

is the tongue’s dream,

& the apple’s red

is the passion of the eye.

8

If a woman wants to be a poet,

she must dwell in the house of the tomato.

9

It is not an emptiness,

the fruit between your legs,

but the long hall of history,

& dreams are coming down the hall

by moonlight.

10

They push up through the loam

like lips of mushrooms.

11

(Artichoke, after Child): Holding the heart base up, rotate it slowly with your left hand against the blade of a knife held firmly in your right hand to remove all pieces of ambition & expose the pale surface of the heart. Frequently rub the cut portions with gall. Drop each heart as it is finished into acidulated water. The choke can be removed after cooking.

12

(Artichoke, after Neruda)

It is green at the artichoke heart,

but remember the times

you flayed

leaf after leaf,

hoarding the pale silver paste

behind the fortresses of your teeth,

tonguing the vinaigrette,

only to find the husk of a worm

at the artichoke heart?

The palate reels like a wronged lover.

Was all that sweetness counterfeit?

Must you vomit back

world after vegetable world

for the sake of one worm

in the green garden of the heart?

13

But the poem about bananas has not yet been written. Southerners worry a lot about bananas. Their skin. And nearly everyone worries about the size of bananas, as if that had anything to do with flavor. Small bananas are sometimes quite sweet. But bananas are like poets: they only want to be told how great they are. Green bananas want to be told they’re ripe. According to Freud, girls envy bananas. In America, chocolate syrup & whipped cream have been known to enhance the flavor of bananas. This is called a banana split.

14

The rice is pregnant.

It swells past its old transparency.

Hard, translucent worlds inside the grains

open like fans. It is raining rice!

The peasants stand under oiled

rice paper umbrellas cheering.

Someone is scattering rice from the sky!

Chopper blades mash the clouds.

The sky browns like cheese soufflé.

Rice grains puff & pop open.

“What have we done to deserve this?”

the peasants cry. Even the babies

are cheering. Cheers slide from their lips

like spittle. Old men kick their clogs

into the air & run in the rice paddies

barefoot. This is a monsoon! A wedding!

Each grain has a tiny invisible parachute.

Each grain is a rain drop.

“They have sent us rice!” the mothers scream,

opening their throats to the smoke…

15

Here should be a picture of my favorite apple.

It is also a nude & bottle.

It is also a landscape.

There are no such things as still lives.

16

In general, modern poetry requires (underline one): a) more fruit; b) less fruit; c) more vegetables; d) less vegetables; e) all of the above; f) none of the above.

17

Astonishment of apples. Every fall.

But only Italians are into grapes,

calling them
eggs
.

O my eggs,

branching off my family tree,

my father used to pluck you,

leaving bare twigs on the dining room table,

leaving mother furious on the dining room table:

picked clean.

Bare ruined choirs

where late the sweet.

A pile of pits.

18

Adam naming the fruit

after the creation of fruit,

his tongue tickling

the crimson lips of the pomegranate,

the tip of his penis licking

the cheeks of the peach,

quince petals in his hair,

his blue arms full of plums,

his legs wrapped around watermelons,

dandling pumpkins on his fatherly knees,

tomatoes heaped around him in red pyramids…

peach

peach

peach

peach

peach

he sighs

to kingdom come.

The man under the bed

The man who has been there for years waiting

The man who waits for my floating bare foot

The man who is silent as dustballs riding the darkness

The man whose breath is the breathing of small white butterflies

The man whose breathing I hear when I pick up the phone

The man in the mirror whose breath blackens silver

The boneman in closets who rattles the mothballs

The man at the end of the end of the line

I met him tonight      I always meet him

He stands in the amber air of a bar

When the shrimp curl like beckoning fingers

& ride through the air on their toothpick skewers

When the ice cracks & I am about to fall through

he arranges his face around its hollows

he opens his pupilless eyes at me

For years he has waited to drag me down

& now he tells me

he has only waited to take me home

We waltz through the street like death & the maiden

We float through the wall of the wall of my room

If he’s my dream he will fold back into my body

His breath writes letters of mist on the glass of my cheeks

I wrap myself around him like the darkness

I breathe into his mouth

& make him real

All over the district, on leather couches

& brocade couches, on daybeds

& “professional divans,” they are confessing.

The air is thick with it,

the ears of the analysts must be sticky.

Words fill the air above couches & hover there

hanging like smog. I imagine

impossible Steinberg scrolls,

unutterable sounds suspended in inked curlicues

while the Braque print & the innocuous Utrillo

look on look on look on.

My six analysts, for example—

the sly Czech who tucked his shoelaces

under the tongues of his shoes,

the mistress of social work with orange hair,

the famous old German who said:

“You sink, zerefore you are,”

the bouncy American who loved to talk dirty,

the bitchy widow of a famous theoretician,

& another—or was it two?—I have forgotten—

they rise like a Greek chorus in my dreams.

They reproach me for my messy life.

They do not offer to refund my money

& the others—siblings for an hour or so—

ghosts whom I brushed in & out of the door.

Sometimes the couch was warm from their bodies.

Only our coats knew each other,

rubbing shoulders in the dark closet.

(
a flip through
BRIDE’S
)

The silver spoons

were warbling

their absurd musical names

when, drawing back

her veil (illusion),

she stepped into

the valentine-shaped bathtub,

& slid her perfect bubbles

in between

the perfect bubbles.

Oh brilliantly complex as

compound interest,

her diamond gleams

(Forever) on the edge

of a weddingcake-shaped bed.

What happens there

is merely icing since

a snakepit of dismembered

douchebag coils (all writhing)

awaits her on the tackier back pages.

Dearly beloved, let’s hymn

her (& Daddy) down

the aisle with

epithalamia composed

for Ovulen ads:

“It’s the right

of every (married) couple

to wait to space         to wait”

—& antistrophes

appended by the Pope.

Good Grief—the groom!

Has she (or we)

entirely forgot?

She’ll dream him whole.

American type with ushers

halfbacks headaches drawbacks backaches

& borrowed suit

stuffed in a borrowed face

(or was it the reverse?)

Oh well. Here’s he:

part coy pajamas,

part mothered underwear

& of course

an enormous prick

full of money.

You don’t really want to be a poet. First of all, if you’re a woman, you have to be three times as good as any of the men. Secondly, you have to fuck everyone. And thirdly, you hare to be dead.

—Mark Strand, in conversation

If a woman wants to be a poet,

she should sleep near the moon with her face open;

she should walk through herself studying the landscape;

she should not write her poems in menstrual blood.

If a woman wants to be a poet,

she should run backwards circling the volcano;

she should feel for the movement along her faults;

she should not get a Ph.D. in seismography.

If a woman wants to be a poet,

she should not sleep with uncircumcised manuscripts;

she should not write odes to her abortions;

she should not make stew of old unicorn meat.

If a woman wants to be a poet,

she should read French cookbooks and Chinese vegetables;

she should suck on French poets to freshen her breath;

she should not masturbate in writing seminars.

If a woman wants to be a poet,

she should peel back the hair from her eyeballs;

she should listen to the breathing of sleeping men;

she should listen to the spaces between that breathing.

If a woman wants to be a poet,

she should not write her poems with a dildo;

she should pray that her daughters are women;

she should forgive her father for his bravest sperm.

(balm for a 27th birthday)

Hooked on for two years now on wrinkle creams        creams for

crowsfeet         ugly lines (if only there were one!)

any perfumed grease        which promises         youth         beauty

not truth        but all I need on earth

I’ve been studying    how women age

how

it starts around the eyes        so you can tell

a woman of 22 from one of 28 merely by

a faint scribbling near the lids        a subtle crinkle

a fine line

extending from the fields of vision

this

in itself is not unbeautiful     promising

as it often does

insights which clear-eyed 22 has no inkling of

promising          certain sure-thighed things in bed

certain fingers on your spine & lids

but

it’s only the beginning        as ruin proceeds downward

lingering for a while around the mouth        hardening the smile

into prearranged patterns (irreversible!)   writing furrows

from the wings of the nose         (oh nothing much at first

but “showing promise”        like your early poems

of deepening)

& plotting lower to the corners of the mouth        drooping them

a little        like the tragic mask        though not at all grotesque