Becoming Light (13 page)

Do they live unhappily ever after?

Of course.

Do they undo their mistakes ever?

Never.

Who is the victim here?

Love is the victim.

Who is the villain?

Love that never dies.

What we were searching for

did not, of course, exist—

that tapestried morning,

under those woven clouds

where impossible birds

sang quite incredibly

of unattainable things.

A moth among the dandelions

warbled like the nightingale of Keats,

& trochees sang among the iambs,

while you in your curled collar & brocaded vest,

were beaming down the sun-strewn silken grass

where I lay in a frenzy of ruffles,

ear pressed to the earth

so I might hear—

the echoing hoofbeats of the unicorn.

He came in a blaze

of embroidered glory, with agate eyes

and his infamous ivory horn

blaring baroque concerti—

& thinking to have captured him for good,

we toasted in white wine and wafers,

and took before witnesses,

impossible vows.

The rest you know:

how in the toadstool damp of evening

where lovers toss and cough,

speaking to each other

in the thick syllables of sleep,

through the long winter’s night of marriage,

the unicorn slips away,

& love, like an insomniac’s nightmare,

becomes only

the lesser of two evils.

Sometimes he comes again,

thrashing through the tapestried dark,

uprooting limbs & sheets

& finespun wisps of hair.

But the quest having been forgotten,

we do not know him,

or else we call him

by a different name.

The poet writes in
I

because she knows

no other language.

We
is a continent,

& a poet must be

an island.

She
is an inlet.

He
is a peninsula.

They
is the great engulfing sea.

The poet writes in
I

as the clock

strikes on metal,

as the bee wing

flies on honey,

as trees are rooted

in the sky.

I
is the language

of the poet’s inner chantings:

a geography of sadness,

a metronome of pain,

a map of elevations

in the jungled heart.

What happens when the juice of the sun

drenches you

with its lemony tang, its tart sweetness

& your whole body stings with singing

so that your toes sing to your mouth

& your navel whistles to your breasts

& your breasts wave to everyone

as you walk down the summer street?

What will you do

when nothing will do

but to throw your arms around trees

& men

& greet every woman as sister

& to run naked in the spray of the fire hydrants

with children of assorted colors?

Will you cover your drenched skin

with woolen clothes?

Will you wear a diaper of herringbone tweed?

Will you piece together a shroud of figleaves

& lecture at the University

on the Lives of the Major Poets,

the History of Despair in Art?

Sweet muse

with bitter milk,

I have lain

between your breasts,

put my ear

to your sea-shell-whispering navel,

& strained the salty marshes

of your sex

between my milk teeth.

Then I’ve slept at last,

my teeming head

against your rocking thigh.

Gentle angry mother

poetry,

where could I turn

from the terror of the night

but to your sweet maddening

ambivalence?

Where could I rest

but in your hurricane?

Who would always take me home

but you,

sweeping off the sooty stoop

of your wind-filled shack

on the edge

of the volcano?

They locked into each other

like brother & sister,

long-lost relations,

orphans divided by time.

He bit her shoulder

& entered her blood forever.

She bit his tongue

& changed the tone of his song.

They walked together astonished

not to be lonely.

They sought their lonelinesses

like lost dogs.

But they were joined together

by tongue & shoulder.

His nightmares woke her;

her daydreams startled him.

He fucked so hard

he thought he’d climb back in her.

She came so hard

her skin seemed to dissolve.

She feared she had no yearning

left to write with.

He feared she’d suck him dry

& glide away.

They spoke of all these things

& locked together.

She figured out

the jigsaw of his heart.

& he unscrambled her

& placed the pieces

with such precision

nothing came apart.

This is the long tunnel of wanting you.

Its walls are lined with remembered kisses

wet & red as the inside of your mouth,

full & juicy as your probing tongue,

warm as your belly against mine,

deep as your navel leading home,

soft as your sleeping cock beginning to stir,

tight as your legs wrapped around mine,

straight as your toes pointing toward the bed

as you roll over & thrust your hardness

into the long tunnel of my wanting,

seeding it with dreams & unbearable hope,

making memories of the future,

straightening out my crooked past,

teaching me to live in the present present tense

with the past perfect and the uncertain future

suddenly certain for certain

in the long tunnel of my old wanting

which before always had an ending

but now begins & begins again

with you, with you, with you.

You are the first muse who came to stay.

The others began & ended with a wish,

or a glance or a kiss between stanzas;

the others strode away in the pointed boots of their fear

or were kicked out by the stiletto heels of mine,

or merely padded away in bare feet

when the ground was too hard or cold

or as hot as white sand baked under the noonday sun.

But you flew in on the wings of your smile,

powered by the engine of your cock,

driven by your lonely pumping heart,

rooted by your arteries to mine.

We became a tree with a double apical point,

reaching equally toward what some call heaven,

singing in the wind with our branches,

sharing the sap & syrup

which makes the trunk grow thick.

We are seeding the ground with poems & children.

We are the stuff of books & new-grown forests.

We are renewing the earth with our roots,

the air with our pure oxygen songs,

the nearby seas with leaves we lose

only to grow the greener ones again.

I used to leap from tree to tree,

speaking glibly of Druids,

thinking myself a latter-day dryad,

or a wood nymph from the stony city,

or some other chimerical creature,

conjured in my cheating poet’s heart.

But now I stay, knowing the muse is mine,

knowing no books will banish him

& no off-key songs will drive him away.

I being & begin; I whistle in & out of tune.

If the ending is near, I do not think of it.

If the drought comes, we will make our own rain.

If the muse is grounded, I will make him fly,

& if he falls, I will catch him in my arms

until he flies with me again.

the decorum of fire…

—Pablo Neruda

We learned the decorum of fire,

the flame’s curious symmetry,

the blue heat at the center of the thighs,

the flickering red of the hips,

& the tallow gold of the breasts

lit from within

by the lantern in the ribs.

You tear yourself out of me

like a branch that longs to be grafted

onto a fruit tree,

peach & pear

crossed with each other,

fig & banana served on one plate,

the leaf & the luminous snail

that clings to it.

We learned that the tearing

could be a joining,

that the fire’s flickering

could be a kindling,

that the old decorum of love—

to the into the poem,

leaving the lover lonely with her pen—

was all an ancient lie.

So we banished the evil eye:

you have to be unhappy to create;

you have to let love die before it writes;

you have to lose the joy to have the poem
—

& we re-wrote our lives with fire.

See this manuscript covered

with flesh-colored words?

It was written in invisible ink

& held up to our flame.

The words darkened on the page

as we sank into each other.

We are ink & blood

& all things that make stains.

We turn each other golden as we turn,

browning each other’s skins like suns.

Hold me up to the light;

you will see poems.

Hold me in the dark;

you will see light.

Contending with the demon doubt

when all of life heaves up into your mouth,

the lies you spat back with your mother’s milk,

the men you loved & hated & betrayed,

the husbands who slept on through windy nights,

the rattling at the panes…

Pain, doubt, the ache to love again.

The man you cuddled to your chest

who went away…

The demon doubt comes back to haunt your life.

You chose to live, & choosing life meant pain.

♦

Throw out the generalizations!

What you meant—you liar poet—

lyre in your mouth…

You meant: I loved him once

& can no more.

You meant: I kept confusing guilt with love.

♦

This is the problem: that we live;

& as we live each body cell must change.

We dream, & as we dream our dreams must change.

We eat, & in devouring life, we change.

♦

We dream we read our lives in some huge book.

Our dreaming eyelids flick the pages past.

The muse writes through our dreams

& dreams our lives.

The book has pages torn & broken type.

♦

& as we dream, some paragraphs are blurred.

& as we read we re-invent the plot.

The eyes are dreaming cells, the eyelids move.

The cells divide as lovers fall apart.

♦

They slide away to sleep, he slips from her.

He sinks into her dream, her dream is filled.

& as she fills with him, her eyes are changed.

He dreams a woman he has never met.

♦

Nothing can stay: the cock grows soft by dawn.

& she seals over like a virgin raped only by dreams.

However much they cling, they drift apart.

Their hands are joined, their dreaming hearts are severed.

♦

They dance the dance of dreamers as they sleep.

This dreamers’ dance: the pattern of their lives.

The partners change, yet always stay the same.

The partners bow, their hearts collide & break.

♦

Slippers beneath the bed, bare toes toward heaven.

Soles cradled in the sheet, the dancers sleep.

They dream they dance & dance & dance again.

They dream the dance of dreamers without feet.

♦

What is the question here? I cannot say.

I am asleep, my tongue is blurred by death.

I spit the pits of death across the bed.

I love my love, yet eat him while he sleeps.

♦

Death is confusing, life more confusing still.

Alive, we dream, & dead, who can be sure?

Since all we have are dreams, let’s join our beds.

This is the dirty laundry poem—

because we have traveled from town to town

accumulating soiled linen & sweaty shirts

& blue-jeans caked & clotted with our juice

& teeshirts crumpled by our gloriously messy passion

& underwear made stiff by all our joy.

I have come home to wash my clothes.

They patter on the bathroom floor like rain.

The water drips away the days till you.

The dirty water speaks to me of love.

Steamy in the bubbles of our love,

I have plunged my hands into hot water

as I might plunge them

in your heart.

After years of spots & splatters,

I am finally coming clean.

I will fly to you with a suitcase of fresh laundry,

strip my clothes off, heap them on the floor,

& let you scrub my body with your love.

In the redwood house sailing off

into the ocean,

I sleep with you—

our dreams mingling,

our breath coming & going

like gusts of wind

trifling with the breakers,

our arms touching

& our legs & our hair

reaching out like tendrils

to intertwine.