One Secret Thing (4 page)

My breasts hardening with milk—little seeps

leaking into the folded husband

hankies set into the front curves

of the nursing harness—I would wander around

the quiet apartment when her nap would last a little

longer than usual. When she was awake, I was

purpose, I was a soft domestic

prowling of goodness—only when she slept

was I free to think the thoughts of one

in bondage. I had wanted to be someone—not just

someone’s mom, but someone, some
one.

Yet I know that this work that I did with her

lay at the heart of what mattered to me—was

that heart. And still there was a part of me

left out by it, as if exposed on a mountain

by mothering. And when she slept in,

I smelled the husks of olive rind

on that slope, I heard the blue knock

of the eucalyptus locket nut, I

tasted the breath of the wolf seeking

the flesh to enrich her milk, I saw the

bending of the cedar under the sea

of the wind—while she slept, it was as if

my pierced ankles loosed themselves

and I walked like a hunter in the horror-joy

of the unattached. Girl of a mother,

mother of a girl, I paced, listening,

almost part-fearing, sometimes, that she might have stopped

breathing, knowing nothing was anything, for me,

next to the small motions as she woke,

light and wind on the face of the water.

And then that faint cry, like a

pelagic bird, who sleeps in flight, and I would

turn, pivot on a spice-crushing heel,

and approach her door.

In the back of the drawer, in the sack, the baby

canines and incisors are mostly chaff,

by now, no whole utensils left:

half an adze; half a shovel—in its

handle, a marrow well of the will

to dig and bite. And the enamel hems

are sharp as shell-tools, and the colors go

from salt, to pee on snow. One cuspid

is like the tail of an ivory chough,

I think it’s our daughter’s, but the dime hermes

mingled the chompers of our girl and boy, safe-

keeping them together with the note that says

Der Toth Farry, Plees Giv Me

A Bag Of Moany.
I pore over the shards

like a skeleton lover—but who could throw out

these short pints of osseous breast-milk,

or the wisdom, with its charnel underside,

and its dome, smooth and experienced,

ground in anger, rinsed in silver

when the mouth waters. From above, its knurls

are a cusp-ring of mountaintops

around an amber crevasse, where in high

summer the summit wildflowers open

for a day—Crown Buttercup, Alpine Flames,

Shooting Star, Rosy Fairy Lantern,

Cream Sacs, Sugar Scoop.

It is an art, a craft, a kind of Home

Ec, slowly pulling out the small

rubber dome, this time almost

full of blackish blood. It is

like war, or surgery, without weapons

or instruments. The darkness of it

has the depth of truth. The clots are shocking and

thrilling in their shapes. I do what some

might do in their last days, knowing they will

never have another chance,

I rub my palms with it, and I want

to go across my face once, in ritual

streaks, but my glasses are on, and I’m in

a slight panic, seeing my reddened

life-lines. For a moment, while I still can,

I want to eat a dot of it,

but not the bitterness of spermicide,

or a sperm dead of spermicide.

Many millions have been killed today—

I hold my hands out to the mirror

over the sink, a moment, like a killer

showing her nature. Then left hand

to hot, right to cold, I turn on

the taps. And blood turns out to be flecks

suspended in water, the washy down

of a red hen. I feel that the dead

would be glad to come back for one moment of this,

in me the dead come back for a moment

to the honor and glory.

On the ten-below-zero day, it was on,

the round-shouldered heater near the analyst’s couch,

at its end, like the child’s headstone which appeared

a year later, in the neighboring plot, near

the foot of my father’s grave. And it was hot, with the

laughing satire of a fire’s heat,

the little coils like hairs in Hell.

And it was making a group of sick noises—

I wanted the doctor to turn it off

but I couldn’t seem to ask, so I just

stared, but it did not budge. The doctor

turned his heavy, soft palm

outward, toward me, inviting me to speak, I

said, “If you’re cold—are you cold? But if it’s on

for me …” He held his palm out toward me,

I tried to ask, but I only muttered,

but he said, “Of course,” as if I had asked,

and he stood and approached the heater, and then

stood on one foot, and threw himself

toward the wall with one hand, and with the other hand

reached down behind the couch, to pull

the plug out. I looked away,

I had not known he would have to bend

like that. And I was so moved, that he

would act undignified, to help me,

that I cried, not trying to stop, but as if

the moans made sentences which bore

some human message. If he would cast himself toward the

outlet for me, as if bending with me

in some old shame, then I would put my trust

in his art—and the heater purred, like a creature

or the familiar of a creature, or the child of a familiar,

the father of a child, the spirit of a father,

the healing of a spirit, the vision of healing,

the heat of vision, the power of the heat,

the pleasure of the power.

The execution building at each

prison is nicknamed after the

equipment it houses.

In a pan of Joy and cold boiled water

lay the gloves I’d picked up, for some reason, off the street, in the sleet—

one large left, one huge right,

like gauntlets of centurions. I ran

in more hot, and coils of wool

surged out, tar pellets, facets of glass,

and there at the bottom was the six-inch spike I had

lifted from the excavation site.

And the spike was too heavy for its four-sided length

and thickness, like a piece of railroad steel

sixteen ounces on its home planet,

16 tons here. It had

a wavy shape, as if poured when hot, and we have

heard the scream when such a nail

is pulled from a human hoof. And the shaft looked

bitten, and the tip curled up like a talon,

and the head was bent down and dented. It looked old

as Rome, and the right size, but Jesus’s

hands would have torn right through, they had nailed him

by his wrists, they didn’t have the chair, yet,

with its scarlet cap, they didn’t have the ovens

for him and his family. I set the gloves

on the daily news, to dry—one lost from one

worker, one lost from another, a left

and a right, the way we are in this together.

What a piece of work is man,

in Albany, and Washington,

in Texas, and in Louisiana, at

Angola, in the Red Hat House.

The night before she went back to college,

she went through my sweater drawer, so when she left she was in

black wool, with maroon creatures

knitted in, an elk branched across her

chest, a lamb on her stomach, a cat,

an ostrich. Eighteen, she was gleaming with a haze

gleam, a shadow of the glisten of her birth

when she had taken off my body—that thick coat, cast

off after a journey. In the elevator

door window, I could see her half-profile—

strong curves of her face, like the harvest

moon, and when she pressed 1,

she set. Hum and creak of her descent,

the backstage cranking of the solar system,

the lighted car sank like a contained

calm world. Eighteen years

I had been a mother! In a way now I was past it—

resting, watching our girl bloom.

And then she was on the train, in her dress

like a zodiac, her body covered with

the animals that carried us in their

bodies for a thousand centuries

of sex and death, until flesh knew itself, and spoke.

After her toxic shock, my mother tried to

climb out of bed in the I.C.U.—half

over the rails, she’d dangle, the wires and

tubes holding her back, I.V.,

oxygen, catheter, blood-pressure cuff,

heart monitor—streaming with strings,

she’d halt, ninety pounds, and then she’d

haul, and the wires and tubes would go taut

and start to rip. So they tied her down,

first her chest in a soft harness,

strapped around the mattress, then her wrists

with long, sterile gauze ribbons,

to the bars of the bed, then, when she kicked until

she raised blue baby-fist welts on her ankles they

put her in five-point. I stood by the bed while she

bucked and tugged, she slowly raised her

head and shoulders like the dead, she called in a

hoarse, cold baritone,

Untie my hands. I sat by the rails,

she was fixed like a constellation to the bed,

and I sang to her, while the Valium

did nothing, not the first shot

or the second, I went through the old carols as she

squirmed and writhed, five-pointed flesh that

gave me life, and when the morphine took her,

I sang her down—Star of wonder,

Star of night.

They tell you it won’t make much sense, at first,

you will have to learn the terrain. They tell you this

at thirty, and fifty, and some are late

beginners, at last lying down and walking

the bright earth of the breasts—the rounded,

cobbled, ploughed field of one,

with a listening walking, and then the other—

fingertip-stepping, divining, north

to south, east to west, sectioning

the low, fallen hills, sweeping

for mines. And the matter feels primordial,

unimaginable—dense,

cystic, phthistic, each breast like the innards

of a cell, its contents shifting and changing,

streambed gravel under walking feet, it

seems almost unpicturable, not

immemorial, but nearly un-

memorizable, but one marches,

slowly, through grave or fatal danger,

or no danger, one feels around in the

two tackroom drawers, ribs and

knots like leather bridles and plaited

harnesses and bits and reins,

one runs one’s hands through the mortal tackle

in a jumble, in the dark, indoors. Outside–

night, in which these glossy ones were

ridden to a froth of starlight, bareback.

When I heard that my mother had stood up after her near

death of toxic shock, at first

I could not get that supine figure in my

mind’s eye to rise, she had been so

flat, her face shiny as the ironing board’s

gray asbestos cover. Once my

father had gone that horizontal, he did

not lift up, again, until he was

fire. But my mother put her fine legs

over the side, got her soles

on the floor, slowly poured her body from the

mattress into the vertical, she

stood between nurse and husband, and they let

go, for a second—alive, upright,

my primate! When I’d last seen her, she was silver

and semi-liquid, like something ladled

onto the sheet, early form

of shimmering life, amoeba or dazzle of

jism, and she’d tried to speak, like matter

trying to speak. Now she stands by the bed,

gaunt, slightly luminous, the

hospital gown hanging in blue

folds, like the picture of Jesus-come-back

in my choir book. She seemed to feel close to Jesus,

she loved the way he did not give up,

nothing could stop his love, he stood there

teetering beside the stone bed and he

folded his grave-clothes.

Whenever I see a chair like it,

I consider it: the no arms,

the lower limbs of pear or cherry.

Sometimes I’ll take hold of the back slat

and lift the four-legged creature off the floor to hear

the joints creak, the wind in the timbers,

hauling of keel rope. And the structure will not

utter, just some music of reed and tether,

Old Testament cradle. Whenever I see

a Hitchcock chair—not a Federal,

or an Eames—I pay close, furniture

attention, even as my mind is taking its

seablind cartwheels back. But if every

time you saw a tree—pear,

cherry, American elm, American

oak, beech, bayou cypress—

your eyes checked for a branch, low enough

but not too low, and strong enough,

and you thought of your uncle, or father, or brother,

third cousin twice removed

murdered on a tree, then you would have

the basis for a working knowledge of American History.

There was a cut clove of garlic, under

a glass tumbler, there were spoons tarnished opal

in a cup, there was a nesting bowl

in a nesting bowl in a nesting bowl

on the sill, when I understood there was a chance they might

have to remove my womb. I bent over,

wanting to cry out, It’s my best friend, it’s like

having a purse of your own, of yourself, it’s like

being where you came from, as if you are your origin,

the basket of life, the withies, the osier

reed weave, where your little best beloveds

lay and took heart, took on the weights

and measures. I love the pear shape,

the upside-downness, the honor of bringing

forth the living so new they can almost

not be said to be dying yet.

And the two who rested, without fear or elation,

against the endometrium,

over the myometrium, held

around by the serosa … In the latter days,

the unclosed top of the precious head pressed

down on the inner os, and down on the

outer os, and the feet played up against

the fundus, and I could feel, in myself—

of myself—the tale of love’s flesh.

Soon enough, the whole small

city of my being will demolish—what if now

one dwelling, the central dwelling,

the holy-seeming dwelling, might go. Like a fiber

suitcase, in a mown field, it stands,

its worn clasps gleaming.