Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (4 page)

In a field where else you found a stack

of revealing nature photographs, of supernude nature

photographs, split beaver of course nature photographs,

photographs full of 70s bush, nature taking come

from every man for miles around, nature with come back

to me just dripping from her lips. The stack came

up to your eye, you saw: nature is big into bloodplay,

nature is into extreme age play, nature does wild inter-

racial, nature she wants you to pee in her mouth, nature

is dead and nature is sleeping and still nature is on all fours,

a horse it fucks nature to death up in Oregon, nature is hot

young amateur redheads, the foxes are all in their holes

for the night, nature is hot old used-up cougars, nature

makes gaping fake-agony faces, nature is consensual dad-

on-daughter, nature is completely obsessed with twins,

nature doing specialty and nature doing niche, exotic females

they line up to drip for you, nature getting paddled as hard

as you can paddle her, oh a whitewater rapid with her ass

in the air, high snowy tail on display just everywhere.

The pictures were so many they started to move. Let me

watch for the rest of my natural life, you said and sank down

in the field and breathed hard. Let me watch and watch

without her knowing, let me see her where she can't see me.

As long as she can't see me, I can breathe hard here forever.

See nature do untold animals sex, see nature's Sicko Teeen

Farm SexFeest, see her gush like the geyser at Yellowstone,

see the shocking act that got her banned in fifty-one states including

Canada. See men for miles around give nature what she needs,

rivers and rivers and rivers of it. You exhale with perfect

happiness. Nature turned you down in high school.

Now you can come in her eye.

Never has an empty hand been made

into more of a fist, and Waterfall Without

it swings so hard it swings out

of existence. How will anyone get married

now, with no wall of water behind them?

How will Over Niagara Falls in a Barrel

marry Across Niagara Falls on a Tightrope?

Over the Falls would have worn a veil,

Across the Falls would have tied a tie,

hand in hand they would have poured

down the aisle to the sound of rustling

silks. Later they would narrow

to a lovely neck, later they would make

a gentle elbow in the water, later

they would pour into a still round pool,

and dance for three minutes to what they

called music. Niagara Falls is a family

member. He is drunk for the first time

in a hundred years. “I don't call that music

I call that noise,” would have screamed

Niagara Falls, right through his aquiline

family nose. All of Niagara's ex-lovers

are here. The World's Steepest Dive

stands up and says, “I've been diving

so long now, and when will I hit?

When will you be there for me, Niagara?”

First Woman Behind the Falls stands up

so everyone can see her, so everyone

can see what has happened to her looks.

“You took the best day of my life,

Niagara.” The World's

Longest Breath-Hold stands up,

she loves him, she drew in her breath

the first time she saw him and never

breathed out again, not ever. The furious

waterfall without water he punches her

into tomorrow; the World's Longest

Breath-Hold is longer now and she calls

to him from the future, “You're here,

you're roaring again where I am,

Tomorrow.” Finally his first love the U-

Shape stands up. Stands up and she says,

“Niagara.” The sound curves down and up

again, even the shape of her voice is a U.

“I don't call that music I call that noise,”

says the furious waterfall without water,

trembling at the very lip, unable to contain

himself, and there he goes roaring

back into her arms.

Says here is a girl who gets written like palms,

says here is a girl who moves paint like Tahiti.

Teeth infinite white and infinite many and with

them she infinite eat me, and mouth full of invert

and cane and coarse sugar, and her dresses all

came from across

the water, and they rode a light chop

on the sea in fast ships, and she owns twenty

pairs of the shape of her hands, and slashed silk

on her shoulder like claws of a parrot, and here

the love poem delights:

the word
parrot
will never

be replaced, and will continue meaning always

exactly what it means, as none of the words

in this sentence have done—come read me again

in a hundred years and see how I keep my shape!

Love poem back to your subject, the word
parrot

is not the right woman for you, hard to hold

and too much red; love poem think long arms

and flies nowhere.

I remember her now, it says, and says she is far

from me, says hear how her voice is a Western

slope, when west meant the sun it rose and set

there, and monstrous the shadows of flowers all

down it, in the days before voice meant something

you wrote with. Love poem as we used to write it

says her small brown paw is adorable, which is

to say brown as we used to use it, which is to say

just sunburned,

just monstrous the shadows of flowers all on it,

which is to say paw as we used to use it, which is

to say a human hand, and human as we used

to use it, which is to say almost no one among us.

Blond of course and blond. Blond as a coil of rope,

and someone hauled on her somewhere, and loop

after loop flew out of her helpless. The someone

was out at sea, and language on my shoulder like

claws of a parrot. I sailed the world over

to deliver one letter, one letter of even one letter,

one word, and one word as we used to use it:

in those days she was the only Lady, in those days

she wrote a small round hand,

and I hauled on it saw it fly loop by loop out of her.

The past, when it was sick right down

to its roses, obsessively checked the mail.

We wore all of our pathways checking

the mail. We went into the woods because

we heard the letters rustling, and we swore

they sounded like letters to us. Even Thoreau,

on Walden Pond, checked his open mouth

every morning, foolishly believing it to be

the mail. We worshipped a great white

body that was an avalanche of good news,

and we slit it open in every part. “That can't

go through the mail,” the postman gasped,

“because that is a super-stabbed body!”

The super-stabbed body rose up, with many

butterknives sticking out of it, and said, “I AM

the mail.” It had so many lovers.

Everyone alive had a finger in it, ripping it open,

sometimes with blood, deep bleeding wounds

of information all over the back-and-forth form.

It took a long time to be delivered then, and traveled

in sacks like shapes of women, and women were

full of secret sharp corners where their postcards

were poking out, and at last in their bedrooms they

sighed with relief as they shook out their sacks

with both hands, and faithfully and affectionately

and yours tumbled out, and even I am tumbled out.

Most letters were love letters until they were not.

That was when the mail began to change—

and “enveloped,” the only word that was believed

to contain its meaning, was opened and found to be

empty. Back then it meant something when my letter

never arrived, and now after ten years reaches you,

who are dead or in love with a lookalike, or so full

of hate for me that you can barely see to read this.

If you're not reading this then it never got there,

and both of us are married to someone else.

The body of the mail still waits for your knife.

Why haven't you written. Why don't you write.

The rape joke is that you were nineteen years old.

The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.

The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.

Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhhh,” it thinks. “Yes.
A goatee.
”

No offense.

The rape joke is that he was seven years older. The rape joke is that you had known him for years, since you were too young to be interesting to him. You liked that use of the word
interesting
, as if you were a piece of knowledge that someone could be desperate to acquire, to assimilate, and to spit back out in different form through his goateed mouth.

Then suddenly you were older, but not very old at all.

The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.

The rape joke is he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living.

Not you!

The rape joke is that he carried a knife, and would show it to you, and would turn it over and over in his hands as if it were a book.

He wasn't threatening you, you understood. He just really liked his knife.

The rape joke is he once almost murdered a dude by throwing him through a plate-glass window. The next day he told you and he was trembling, which you took as evidence of his sensitivity.

How can a piece of knowledge be stupid? But of course you were so stupid.

The rape joke is that sometimes he would tell you you were going on a date and then take you over to his best friend Peewee's house and make you watch wrestling while they all got high.

The rape joke is that his best friend was named Peewee.

OK, the rape joke is that he worshipped The Rock.

Like the dude was completely in love with The Rock. He thought it was so great what he could do with his eyebrow.

The rape joke is he called wrestling “a soap opera for men.” Men love drama too, he assured you.

The rape joke is that his bookshelf was just a row of paperbacks about serial killers. You mistook this for an interest in history, and laboring under this misapprehension you once gave him a copy of Günter Grass's
My Century
, which he never even tried to read.

It gets funnier.

The rape joke is that he kept a diary. I wonder if he wrote about the rape in it.

The rape joke is that you read it once, and he talked about another girl. He called her Miss Geography, and said “he didn't have those urges when he looked at her anymore,” not since he met you. Close call, Miss Geography!

The rape joke is that he was your father's high school student—your father taught World Religion. You helped him clean out his classroom at the end of the year, and he let you take home the most beat-up textbooks.

The rape joke is that he knew you when you were twelve years old. He once helped your family move two states over, and you drove from Cincinnati to St. Louis with him, all by yourselves, and he was kind to you, and you talked the whole way. He had chaw in his mouth the entire time, and you told him he was disgusting and he laughed, and spat the juice through his goatee into a Mountain Dew bottle.

The rape joke is that
come on
, you should have seen it coming. This rape joke is practically writing itself.

The rape joke is that you were facedown. The rape joke is you were wearing a pretty green necklace that your sister had made for you. Later you cut that necklace up. The mattress felt a specific way, and your mouth felt a specific way open against it, as if you were speaking, but you know you were not. As if your mouth were open ten years into the future, reciting a poem called Rape Joke.

The rape joke is that time is different, becomes more horrible and more habitable, and accommodates your need to go deeper into it.

Just like the body, which more than a concrete form is a capacity.

You know the body of time is
elastic
, can take almost anything you give it, and heals quickly.

The rape joke is that of course there was blood, which in human beings is so close to the surface.

The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke.

It was a year before you told your parents, because he was like a son to them. The rape joke is that when you told your father, he made the sign of the cross over you and said, “I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” which even in its total wrongheadedness, was so completely sweet.

The rape joke is that you were crazy for the next five years, and had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened. Like you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn't there, and you were looking down into the center of the earth, which played the same red event perpetually.

The rape joke is that after a while you weren't crazy anymore, but close call, Miss Geography.

The rape joke is that for the next five years all you did was write, and never about yourself, about anything else, about apples on the tree, about islands, dead poets and the worms that aerated them, and there was no warm body in what you wrote, it was elsewhere.

The rape joke is that this is finally artless. The rape joke is that you do not write artlessly.

The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you're asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.

The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn't know, like what else would a rape joke say? The rape joke said YOU were the one who was drunk, and the rape joke said you remembered it wrong, which made you laugh out loud for one long split-open second. The wine coolers weren't Bartles & Jaymes, but it would be funnier for the rape joke if they were. It was some pussy flavor, like Passionate Mango or Destroyed Strawberry, which you drank down without question and trustingly in the heart of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.

Can any part of the rape joke be funny. The part where it ends—haha, just kidding! Though you did dream of killing the rape joke for years, spilling all of its blood out, and telling it that way.

The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.

The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.

The rape joke is that the next day he gave you
Pet Sounds
. No really.
Pet Sounds
. He said he was sorry and then he gave you
Pet Sounds
. Come on, that's a little bit funny.

Admit it.