Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (3 page)

How many sets of her parents are dead. How

many times over is she an orphan. A plane,

a crosswalk, a Boer war. A childbirth, of course,

her childbirth. When she, Shirley Temple, came

out of her mother, plump even at her corners

like a bag of goldfish, and one pinhole just one

pinhole necessary. Shirley Temple, cry for us,

and Shirley Temple cried. The first word of no

baby is “Hello,” how strange. The baby believes,

“I was here before you, learning to wave just

like the Atlantic.” Alone in the world

just like the Atlantic, and left on a doorstep

just like the Atlantic, wrapped in the grayest,

roughest blanket. Shirley Temple gurgled

and her first words were, “Your father is lost

at sea.” “Your mother was thrown by a foam-

colored horse.” “Your father's round face is

a round set of ripples.” “Every gull has a chunk

of your mom in its beak.”

Shirley Temple what makes you cry. What do

you think of to make you cry. Mommies stand

in a circle and whisper to her. “Shirley Temple

there will be war. Shirley Temple you'll get no

lunch.” Dry, and dry, and a perfect desert. Then:

“Shirley Temple your goldfish are dead,

they are swimming toward the ocean even now,”

and her tears they fall in black

and white, and her tears they star in the movie.

She cries so wet her hair uncurls, and then the rag

is in the ringlet and the curl is in the wave, she thinks

of dimples tearing out of her cheeks and just running,

out of cheeks knees and elbows and running hard

back to the little creamy waves where they belong,

and the ocean. Her first

glimpse of the ocean was a fake tear for dad.

A completely filled eye for her unseen dead father,

who when he isn't dead he is gone across the water.

One segment of a worm ago I was a swan,

I stank of the surface of lake just the surface

and I was a sight on the water. Why is it always

the swans, why is it never the stilts who turn

human, the stilts who would know how to walk

at least? I lift my webfoot for once and for all

and I try to climb one step, but a blubbery force-

field surrounds me now and I learn why human

women bounce: they're deeply encased in pink

rubber, so sad. The smell

of it, erasing! Erasing a picture

of what? Pink Pearl is written everywhere!

A bite mark on one end, a mouth of incisors

and molars and canines—out of nowhere I know

the proper terms, I suddenly want to know every-

thing else, and whenever I felt that way on the lake

I simply ate a fish-head, but fish-heads won't fill

me now. Your attention is a fish-head,

so throw it back into my new body, back

into the body climbing the stairs. For ten years

writers loved phantom hands and wrote with

and about them nonstop, this particular writer

wrote, I quote,

“She lifted her phantom hand and she threw it

to the swans,” but where are all the writers who

had extra hands sewed on? Which hand should

get the pen? The one that never wrote a word

or the one that knows what to do? Is there one

that knows what to do, is this it? A grown girl

swan is called a what, the tips of my fingers

can almost touch it! You'll look it up when you

get home—a recent transformation has no way

of knowing which wordplays are mostly

exhausted. My hair blows out behind me, where

my hair is attached to my head

I can feel a rushing

hot pivot, like where the wind changes direction.

I think that's where I begin to be dead, the best

part of this new body—better to be in one cell

of a swan! When I finally feel where these new

legs end,

I'll take two at a time to the top

of the stairs and two at a time back down,

and I'll walk to the lake and climb in a swanboat

and ride as a gizzard inside it.

Really, like a urine but even more gold,

I thought of that line and I felt it, even

between two legs I felt it, the legs I wrote

just now, a panic, a run-walk to the private

room with a picture of a woman

on the door, or else the line was long, too long,

I barged into the men's, and felt stares burning

hard like reading or noon, felt them looking

me up and over, felt them looking me over

and down, and all the while just holding their

pens,

they do it different oh no they don't,

they do it standing up, they do it at the window,

they do it so secret in a three-hour bath, they do it

aloud to someone else, their wife is catching

every word and every word is gold. What you eat

is in it, blackberries for breakfast are in it,

fat atoms of Shakespeare and Hitler are in it.

The sound of water makes me need to: Atlantic,

Pacific, Caspian, Black. I feel it so much because

I am pregnant, I am pregnant with a little self,

all of its self

is that spot on a dog that causes its leg to kick.

It kicked and I felt and I wrote that last line. Even

now it's happening. I eat only asparagus like arrows,

I am famous for my aim. I get almost none on my hands,

almost. Under my feet the streets, under the streets

the pipes. Inside the pipes a babble sound.

Doing what, I don't know, being alive. The green

of her is a scum on the surface, she would like

to look at herself. Should I have a memory?

she wonders. Of mother washing my frogskin

in muddy water? I do not have that memory.

My near-transparent frogskin? Mother washing

it with mud to keep it visible? I do not have that

memory, almost, almost. Warmblooded though

she knows for a fact, and spontaneously generated

from the sun on stone, and one hundred vertebrae in every

wave of the lake, as one hundred vertebrae in every wave

of her. All of her meat blue rare blue rare, a spot

on her neck that would drive her wild if anyone ever

touched it, and the tip of her tail ends with -ness and

-less. So far all she knows of the alphabet is signs

that say NO SWIMMING.

So far all she knows is her whereabouts.

Has great HATRED for the parochial, does the liver

of the lake. Would like to go to universe . . . al . . . ity?

She has heard there is a good one in Germany.

They stay up all night drinking some black sludge,

and grow long beards rather than look at them-

selves, and do thought experiments like: if I am not

in Scotland, does Scotland even exist? What do I look

like when no one is looking? She would listen to them

just as hard as she could with the mud-sucking holes

in her head—and they, she thinks, would listen back,

with their ears so regularly described as seashell.

The half of her that is underwater would like to be

under a desk, the head of her that is underwater

would like to be fully immersed.

I will be different there,

she thinks, with a powerful wake ahead of me.

When will the thinkers come for me. Visited only

here by believers. Is so deep-sea-sick of believers.

When will the thinkers come for me here, where

the green stretches out before me, and I am my own

front lawn. The green is a reflective green, a green

in the juicy shadows of leaves—a
bosky
even green—

a word I will learn to use, and use without self-

consciousness, when at last I go to Germany. I have

holed myself away here, sometimes I am not here

at all, and I feel like the nice clean hole in the leaf

and the magnifying glass above me.

She looks to the believers on the shore. A picture

it would last longer! shouts Nessie.

Does NOT believe photography can rise to the level

of art, no matter how much rain falls in it, as levels

of the lake they rose to art when Nessie dipped

her body in it. Nessie wants to watch herself doing

it. Doing what, I don't know, being alive. The lake

bought one Nessie and brought her home. She almost

died of loneliness until it gave her a mirror. The lake

could be a mirror, thinks Nessie. Would be perfectly

still if I weren't in it.

In the cities all the poets, and in all the cities,

bedbugs. Fat with their black lyric blood! Alive

at only night, and there and then not there. Better

bedbugs than the ones that eat paper, say poets—

the ones that eat paper are in our blood

and the bedbugs eat them up, rip rip, and our paper

creamily goes on whole, with not a single real space

between sentences in it. They say come to the cities

and there

become Great! The poets have money to spend

in the cities: they spend the newest American dollars,

the crisp-aired greenest American dollars, blazing

with pictures of National Parks. “The Old Faithful

Geyser almost gushes off the note!” At last money admits

the power of poetry, at last money admits it is written

on—and this piece of paper almost gushes, so go to a city

and spend it. The poets in cities save their money

and travel to National Parks, and never sleep at night

there, no one sleeps in a National Park, they stay up late

and inseminate each other with memories of mountains

and glimpses of wildlife, and human reflections in stilly

chill lakes, and afterward they lie awake, miles away

from any city, miles away from their living mattresses

where their absent shapes are getting sucked

for their blood. Oh the bedbugs are happy; in bedbug prison,

the locked-up poet is writing his poems, in blood just like

the first time. Oh the poets are happy back in the cities, there

are legible smears on their sheets every day, and a pricking

always on their skin like something is coming

for them through the grass, long green grass

of where they came from.

Is the last man alive on this earth. He has the cities

to himself, and even has the blondes, who are over

his shoulders not kicking or screaming. He carries

them wherever he carries the gorilla. “I can see straight

through and past your mask,” the gorilla-suit actor

tells himself. “I can see your eyes twinkle way up

with the stars. Between two skyscrapers I can see them.

By the end the audience will recognize you. By the end

they will see you as one of them, by the end they will see

their faces in your face,”

and the audience feels themselves lifted up too,

and the audience leaves one by one. “Where is the movie,

where is my movie?” the gorilla cries in despair. He beats

his bass chest, there is only silence. He opens his mouth

and makes the loud frightened music the score makes

when we first see him. He is taller than even he remembers.

Comets streak through and through his head. All the blondes

are thrown over his shoulders, the blondes he never even

liked, the bunches of blondes he mistook for bananas. What

he likes is the Chrysler Building, all nipped and shirred

at the waist. What he likes is the cool copper Statue of Liberty.

What he likes, getting bigger, is that high-heeled continent.

What he likes, he thinks, sweat dripping sky to the ground,

is the great gorilla-suit itself and its long great line of inhabitants.

The late great is alone, is alone on the earth. The sun approaches

hotter than hot, the last and screamingest of the blondes.

The last of the great is as big as deep space, the last of the late

is as big as the night, he reaches out and grabs the sun, he is

stuffed with the stars of gorilla-suit acting, all gorilla-suit

actors are moving his arms, all gorilla-suit actors are moving

his legs, and we make the sad music the score makes

when the gorilla is shot full of holes, and “Remember me!”

we cry to no one at large, and burst out of the suit at last

to breathe, last of the late great gorilla-suit actions.

We are watching a crayon being made, we are children,

we are watching the crayon become crayons

and more crayons and thinking how can there be enough

room in America to make what makes it up, we are thinking

all America is a factory by now, the head of it churning out

fake oranges, the hand of it churning out glass bottles,

the heel of it churning out Lego men.

We are watching lifelike snakes get made, we are watching

lifelike rats get made, we are watching army men get made;

a whole factory for magic wands, a whole factory

for endless scarves, a whole factory, America, for the making

of the doves, a whole factory, America,

for the making of long-eared

rabbits and their love of deep dark holes. We are watching

a marble being made, how does the cat's eye get in the marble

and how does the sight get into that, how does the hand get

on it, how does the hand attach to the child, how does the child

attach to the dirt, and how does the dirt attach to its only name,

America. The name is manufactured here by rows of me in airless

rooms. Sunlight is accidental, sunlight is runoff

from the lightbulb factory, is ooze on the surface of all our rivers.

Our abandoned factories make empty space and our largest

factory produces distance and its endless conveyor produces miles.

And people in the basement produce our underground. Hillbilly

teeth are made here, but hillbilly teeth are made everywhere

maybe. The factory that makes us is overseas, and meanwhile we,

America, churn out China, France, Russia, Spain, and our glimpses

of them from across the ocean. Above the factory billowing clouds

can be seen for miles around. Long line of us never glances up

from the long line of glimpses we're making, we could make

those glimpses in the dark, our fingertips could see to do it,

all the flashing fish in the Finger Lakes

have extra-plus eyes in America. The last factory, which makes last

lines, makes zippers for sudden reveals: a break in the trees opens

ziiiip on a view, the last line opens ziiiip on enormous meaning.