Poetry

Composition No. 1

If I say the woman who birthed me, betrayed me, you may think that woman badly distilled, needful, but if I say the woman who betrayed me was herself betrayed, you may think of her as gesture, exile, spilled out because when we think of exile or of the innocent gesture —if there’s any such thing as the gesture that’s innocent— we must also think intolerable mirror, the mirror never thinking, of course, that it could become obsession or that it might just peel away. And If I say peel or blunder or mercy, you may think my vision too fragile and you’re half right— from somewhere, unbidden, my mother, betrayed by my birth, hisses: here’s a swaying bridge, cross over, compose the dark.

Note. The last italicized phrase is a line from Larry Levis’s “Elegy With A Chimneysweep Falling Inside It.”

She, named P_______ At Birth, Speaks to Me, Says

you think you know who you are: you do not. You think everything’s great in your gravy train life, your feet up on the taboret, sipping fingers of Pernod and blowing smoky O’s of Gauloise like you were born to it. You were not. You were born at County Gen., the random upshot of a collision between an urgent virgin, a married man, and the backseat of a Studebaker though everyone knows there was no joy the night you got made. You came into this world on cotton rough from 10,000 washings. The doc showed up late; then spilled a little Maxwell House on the sheets; the nurses yawned. Mama cried for you for 16 hours before her water broke, and she’s been in labor for you all her life. But no one came; no one came to see. So in time, mama just gave you away. Of course, you don’t remember that just like you don’t remember me. Me, who never got the pretty dresses. Never got the vacations at the beach. Never sat down with the family to eat lamb and mint jelly on a sunny Easter day. No, you don’t remember me. It’s as though you were born to the manor, born to speak lousy French and read Edwardian novels in a hot- house; to gad about at high-tone schools, to raise your finger just so, so the ruby shines. But you don’t know who you really are, Miss Don’t-Remind-Me; Miss Given-Away-Four- Times-Until-You-Were-Taken-for-Good. Well, you got my blood in your veins, and you ain’t no fancy dancer, you ain’t no pearls and piety, you ain’t no seashell by the seashore, and you sure ain’t no evening out at Lincoln Center. You got me in your veins, got my chipped white fence, my regular job, my 39-dollar-a-night room in Vegas, and this name that ain’t gonna be at the end of any poem. But don’t worry, my sister, my slip of a pen, I’ll never let you forget the night that you were born, my name was all you had.

The Long Look

—this boy I am remembering put his eyes on me— he stepped out of his body pooling around his ankles like a lagoon— He put his eyes on me and they were shameless— less rapacious than cling and shadow and I must have looked like an icon or a victim: arms, waist, shoulders and their blades, butt and kneecaps all of me an improbable bargain Still, he didn’t take his eyes away— just let them unbend then open like envelopes while he inhaled looked at my wrists and heels and any other part of my anatomy he had not yet oppressed— Darkly, my flesh turned and my skin, wanting, spoke: don’t please but he wasn’t finished—