I Go Back to May 1937
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, their
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to get married, they are about to graduate,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his handsome arrogant face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it. 

Kindergarten Abecedarian

I thought what I had to do was to read was to read
the very long word over the chalk board
Ab-cadev-ge-hich-glem-not-gwer-two-wic-skivs.
But what I had to do was look at the crescent moon
And go ca-ca-ca-ca with my mind
It was strange, like other things, that a very large boy owned everything
Even a fire where he could put you for the thoughts in your head.
Each day I tried to read the world to find his name in it
The tree’s bending in cursive, the bee’s looping their skyscrapers
Noon was ca-ca-ca, Cereal bowl uh-uh-uh
Cactum pa-pa-pa
Ca-ca, uh-uh, pa-pa
Ca-uh-pa, ca-uh-pa
Cup
Would God be mad? I had made a false cup in my mind
And although he had made my mind and owned it
Maybe this was not his cup
Maybe he could not put this cup in hell and make it scream the cup scream
Maybe the paper world was our’s as the actual world was His
I was becoming a reader
For a moment I almost remember it
When I stood back on other side of the alphabet
A, B, C, D, E, F, G
And took that first step in
H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P
And stood astride the line of the border of literacy
Q, R, S, T, U, V
I would work for a life of this, I would ask sanctuary
W, X, Y, Z. 

His Costume

Somehow I never stopped to notice
that my father liked to dress as a woman
He had his sign language about women
Talking too much and being stupid
But whenever there was a costume party
He would dress like us
The tennis balls for breasts, balls for breasts
The long blond wig, the lipstick
He would way his body with moves of gracefulness
As if one being could be the whole universe
It’s ends curving back to come up from behind I
Six feet and maybe 180, 190
He had the shapely legs of a male grable.
In a short skirt he leaned against a bookcase pillar,
nursing his fifth drink, gazing around from inside his
mascara purda with those salty eyes
The woman from next door had a tail and ears
She was covered with Reynolds wrap
She was kitty foil
And my mother was in a tiny tuxedo
But he always won the prize
Those nights he had a look of daring
As if he was getting away with something
A look of triumph, of having stolen back
And as far as I knew, he never threw up as a woman
Or passed out or made those signals of scorn with his hand
Just leaned voluptuous, at ease, deeply present
As if sensing his full potential
Crossing over into himself and back,
Over and back.

Blink Your Eyes

I was on my way to see my woman,
But the law said I was on my way
through a red light, red light, red light
And if you saw my woman you could understand
I was just being a man
It wasn’t about no light, it was about my ride
And if you saw my ride you could dig that too, you dig
Sunroof, stereo, radio, black leather, bucket seats sit low
You know the body’s cool but the tires are worn
Ride when the hard times come, ride when they’re gone
In other words the light was green
I could wake up in the morning without a warning
And the my world could change
Blink your eyes
All depends, all depends on the skin,
All depends on the skin we’re living in
Up to the window comes the law with his hand on his gun
"What’s up? What’s happening?" I said
I guess that's when I really broke the law
He said a routine, step out the car routine
Assume the position.
"Put your hands up in the air. You know the routine.
Like you just don’t care. License and registration."
Deep was the night and the light from the
North star and the car door. Deja vous.
We’ve been through this before. Why did you stop me?
"Somebody had to stop you. I watch the news.
You always lose. You’re unreliable.
That’s undeniable. This is serious.
You could be dangerous."
I could wake up in the morning without a warning
and my world could change
Blink your eyes
All depends, all depends on the skin,
All depends on the skin we’re living in.
New York City, they got laws
Can’t no brothers drive outdoors in certain neighborhoods
on particular streets near and around certain types of people
They got laws
All depends, all depends on the skin
All depends on the skin you’re living in. 

"In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me.
What it meant
I didn’t know what it meant
that he was born in the beauty of the lilies.
Maybe bulbs that had been planted
around the timbers of the stable,
or the myrrh king had brought them,
or the frankincense king
But the kings came after the birth
and he was born in the beauty
Maybe in the longest night of the winter
he was somehow born on Easter
I love that he was born across the sea
As if born into the whole width of the air
between here and that holy place,
the barn under the meteor
They didn’t talk about the hay or the water trough
Or the blood or the milk or the manure with its straw seeds inside it
But sometimes they showed him in her arms almost nursing
The light around his head like a third breast in the scene
They said he was born with a glory in his bosom
He had his own bosom as if he was his own mother
As well as his own father
And she wore blue, always unmarked
She never wore fleur de lie
And yet he was born in the beauties of the lilies
This morning when I looked at a lily, just beginning to open,
its long slender pouch tipped with soft pearling back lips
and I could peak just slightly in and see the clasping interior
the cache of pollen, and smell the extreme sweetness,
I thought they were shyly saying Mary’s body
He came from the blossom of a woman
He was born in the beauty of her lily. 

The Diagnosis

By the time I was six months old
She knew there was something wrong with me
I got looks on my face she had not seen on any child in the family
Or in the extended family, or the neighborhood
My mother took me in to the pediatrician, a tall thin man
With a lantern jaw and kind hands
A doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel -
Hub Long
My mother did not tell him what she thought in truth -
That I was possessed
It was just these strange looks on my face
He held me and conversed with me, chatting as one does with a baby
And my mother said, "She’s doing it now. Look, she’s doing it now."
And the doctor said, "What your daughter has is called a sense of humor."
"Oh," she said and took me back to the house
Where that sense would be tested and found to be incurable. 

That Moment

It is almost too long ago to remember
When I was a woman without children
A person really, like a figure standing in a field
Alone, dark against the shadowy crop
The children were there,
They were shadowy figures outside the fence,
Indistinct as distant blobs of faces at twilight.
I can’t remember anymore, the moment I turned to take them
My heel turning on the earth,
Grinding the heads of the stalks of grain under my foot
My body suddenly swinging around
As the flat figure on a weather vane will swerve when the wind changes
I can’t remember the journey from the center of the field to the edge
Or the cracking of the fence like the breaking down of the borders of the world
Or my stepping out of the ploughed field all together
And taking them in my arms like you take the whites and yolks of eggs
In your arms, running over you gluttonous streaked, slimy, glazing you
I cannot remember that instant when I gave my life to them
The way someone will suddenly give her life over to God
And I stood with them outside the universe
And then, like a God, I turned and brought them in.

When I saw the dark Egyptian stain,
I went down into the house to find you, mother
Past the grandfather clock, with its huge ochre moon
Past the burnt sienna woodwork, rubbed and glazed
I went deeper and deeper down into the body of the house
Down below the level of the earth
And I found you there where I had never found you
By the washtubs, your hand thrust deep in soapy water
And above your head the blazing windows at the circus of the ground
You looked up from the iron sink,
A small haggard pretty woman of 40, one week divorced
"I’ve got my period mom," I said and saw your face
abruptly break open and glow with joy
"Baby," you said, coming toward me, hands out
And covered with tiny delicate bubbles like seeds. 

Self Portrait, Rear View

At first I almost do not believe it, in the hotel triple mirror
That that is my body,
In back, below the waist, and above the legs
The thing that doesn’t stop moving when I stop moving
And it doesn’t even look like just one thing
Or even one big double thing
Even the word saddlebags has a smooth calfskin feel to it
Compared to this compendium of net string bags
Shaking our booty of cellulite, fruits, and nuts
Some lumps look like bon bons translated in tact from chocolate box to buttocks
The curl on top showing slightly through my skin
Once I see what I can do with this, I do it
High-stepping to make the rapids of my bottom
Rush and ripple like a world wonder
Slowly I believe what I am seeing
A 54-year-old rear end, once a tight end
High and mighty, almost a chicken butt
Now exhausted as if tragic
But this is not an invasion
My cul-de-sac is not being used to hatch
alien cells, bald peas, gyroscopes, sacks of marbles
It’s my hoard of treasure, my good luck
Not to be dead, yet
But when I toss the main of my ass again
And see in a clutch of eggs, each egg on its own as if shell-less, shudder
I wonder if anyone has ever died looking in a mirror in horror
I think I will not even catch a cold from it
I will go to school to it, to Butt Boot Camp
To the video store where I saw in the window
My hero, my workout jelly roll model, my apotheosis –
Killer Buns.

"You are fortunate, dear friends, that you can tell what happened with your lover
The jests and laughter, all the words and joy
After my sweetheart put his hands to the heart of my dress
I swear that I remember nothing."

"To love somebody who doesn’t love you
is like going to a temple
and worshipping the behind
of a wooden statue
of a hungry devil."

"Some there are who say that the fairest thing seen on the black earth is an array of horsemen.
Some, men marching,
Some would say ships
But I would say she who one loves best is the loveliest."

Poem for the Breasts

Like other identical twins
They can be better told apart in adulthood
One is fast to wrinkle her brow, her brain, her quick intelligence
The other, dreams inside a constellation, freckles of Orion
They were born when I was thirteen
They rose up half out of my chest
Now they are forty, wise, generous
I am inside them, in a way, under them
Or I carry them
I was alive so long without them
I can’t say I envy them, though their feelings are almost my feelings
As with someone one deeply loves
They seem to me like a gift that I have to give
That boys were said to worship their categoriac being,
Almost starve for it, did not escape me.
And some men loved them the way one would want oneself to be loved
All year they have been calling to my husband,
Singing to him, like a pair of soaking sirens on a scaled rock,
They cannot believe he could leave them
It isn’t vanity
They themselves were made of promise
And so they believed in the word
Sometimes now I hold them a moment,
One in each hand, twin widows heavy with grief
They were a gift to me
And then they were ours
Like little nurslings of excitement and plenty
And now it is summer again, late summer
The very week he moved out
Didn’t he whisper to them, "Wait here for me one year"?
No he said, "God be with you. God by with you. God by,
For the rest of this life and for the long nothing."
And they do not know language. They are waiting for him.
My Christ, they are dumb. They do not even know they are mortal.
Sweet, I guess. Refreshing to live with.
Beings without the knowledge of death.
Creatures of ignorant suffering. 

Animal Crackers:

I liked to bite the hindquarters off the hippopotamuses
And the humps off the camel
I loved tails and ears, like those of the hollow chocolate rabbit
who appeared in my house when Jesus rose
The indented spots on the leopards sent me
The deep engravings in the zebra’s side
Sometimes I liked to save the head
and pop it in and attend
To feel that brain of dumb sugar and flour added to mine
And now that I am half old
I want some poet crackers
Some smarts, Sinclairs, little busts or cameos of everyone
To eat
I ate Christ in the bunny
I want a Whitman communion matzo
I want Dickinson by her own recipe
And Keats bright oatmeal broach
I need to read, lipread, toothread,
Ruth Stone, Langston Hughes
Oh sweet, salty Rookheiser cracker
And I would like to be one
No matter it is undeserved
I want to be in those little boxes with woven handles like shed snakeskins
Edible Cannels, Clifton, and Olzas
I wish, when I am dead, that I could be among
the English and American animal crackers.