Nudity

Nudity


Writing

is dying.  But the war

was not about borders it was about surrender—

                                    Brenda Hillman

                        from “A Dwelling”

sometimes the daring we need is the monstrous 
possibility of a blank page and our trembling rage to stand

in front of it without a stitch on—as though an auction

were about to start and the auctioneer had not arrived,

and the audience were stumbling with their bidding

cards and having second thoughts and second thoughts

about their second thoughts—and it shines all on its own

the calming down after a long snow, when the limbs and wires

hold all they can and simply let the rest go and still it

gathers as nicely at their feet as you please and the span

of the shadow will grow with the sun if it arrives—but now

its all perfectly still and the dejected have gone home

and the whole space and the future house the future

music are all sold to the lowest bidder for a hold out and a song

Under Bridges

Under Bridges

I longed for her because she had turned away

toward what did not include me.

I longed for her

though I understood what important work she had,

thoughI knew she was “very busy”—

                        “Sideways Tractate”

                        Brenda Hillman

I’ve been thinking lately: you know how grieving surfaces us,

but doesn't, how it’s under water for its own long, long time and we wait for it

to come back up again, we watch where it went down, we watch

and watch and when the top is clear again, when the clouds move

without being disturbed, we give up and turn away—and miss,

up stream, the entire breach, the slick cull of the veil

of water on her face, her turned down but smiling mouth, her

everything pulled, the flat suck of the t-shirt and shorts and all

they hide but don’t because I’ve had my hands all over that body

and know where every little mole every little shiver every stiff

and slick slide is, Jesus, why do we look away at all why do we even think

what’s gone is sunk and will hit bottom exactly there, that what’s done

is dead to us, why don’t we move where the water moves?  

Because don’t 

the dead drift, after they sink, quite simply, and grow old on the bottom

while we grow old on the top, having turned away, and even though

I’m afraid to say it out loud my lips still feel the surfaces they've touched

and sunk beneath, only they couldn't hold my breath as long,

and short of dying, which is what she did eventually, in another body

of water entirely, I broke the river in two and came to shore and waited

bridges far, far away, beneath what I cannot cross today without thinking

she’d die under one, on land but under one, near the water, ice

creeping up her shoe near the heel first of all—

A Maple, A Rising, Late May Sun

A Maple, A Rising, Late May Sun

On the last day of the world

I would want to plant a tree

…with the sun already

going…

and the water…

in the earth…

over its leaves

          W. S. Merwin "Place" 

The sun is the palm of your hand sliding up the rough

trunk of a three hundred year old maple—at least

the arborist said three hundred, the one who’d come, I haven't told anyone,

to diagnose the heart rot, how much time it’s got before

we should do the right thing and have it cut down.  But

that was when the sun, palm of your hand, was still the night, and her skirts

unseasonably below freezing for so late in May, and we’d thought

the early hot-house starts would keep

their white frost forever or at least until they simply

fainted from it all and fell over, out of breath, like the too

corseted ladies in a sweat at the king’s coronation. 

Look, though!  the canopy is throbbing green.  Yes it was

a sluggish start, all old trees, aren’t they slow to open, and don’t

they want that slightly-palsied-wise-hand dance to wake

the both of them, the fingers on the thigh, because the winter’s been

long and May after this April's been somewhat peculiar…

But briefly,

and as I wondered about other things, I looked into the east

and because it was cold and because it was wet, and the clematis

and the peony were a fist in their petaled cell, I thought about them

opening early, and the cold rain building a chill, but I noticed

the waist of the maple absolutely steaming with you, the way, I’ve said, you rose

up her thigh and the night dreams, having long penetrated her

thick bark, were coming undone, and I had to stand

back to see because close up it’d seemed to stop all together,

but away a yard or so it was all veil rising up, steam a breath,

steam a need, steam enough to stay, gently, the blades

and the cranes…and I thought: if we’d all had such choices

of those we let inside of us, I’d want that same hand that found my last

leaf last fall, and every fall, to touch me, beneath and out

of view of the street, in the retreat I’d been defending all along, but not knowing

not knowing before this very second look back beside the peony and clematis.

Jealousy

Jealousy

I want to say:

                        there’s a patch of moonlight

                        on the rug.  Get up, stand in it, be seen through—

I want you:

                        … out in the night

                        where the ragged patches converge:

But the only thing that’s said is no-

thing and I think it’s been like this, for the length

of the span of your finger on my arm, but that’s not

accurate.  I don’t want to be, but still, I’m pulled out

of it, my sheath

of skin, as if it were slit down the inseam

and the whole thing ungloved.  For the width

of that, and then the long buzz of nerves’ neurons

aimless groping sizzle when the squeeze

is let go, throbs like withdrawal, or, if after

you’ve stayed in, the slow hum of coming

off pitch.

The moon is new these days.  And out

now in the day.  But clouds, their flat hobnail span,

smother it anyway.  And I am a careless

gardener.  Imagine.  No don’t.  consider—instead—

the cause of our seceding and then,

entering other grottos, it’s all ceiling light

it’s all fire from someone else’s mouth. 

So where can it go, where can it all go but out

the tube of sound.  Oh.  A sighed Oh.  Not the

caught OH! but soft, moss absorbed (oh)—salt-

less.  Words are fine, sure, here in the dark

and the coming rain.  They’re made for you

but fit like a clumsy shirt.  It’s the wrong size.

Is it true that the body remembers everything

it’s ever held?  Listen, the poet who wants you

to walk into that patch of moonlight, the woman

who doesn't give a shit for the thread

coming undone, she’s saying this too, she’s saying:

                        everything that lets go

                        still has its memory of attachment

                        and that which refused to let go

                        still has its uses—

Necrotising Enterocolitis

Necrotising Enterocolitis

--You think about a poem too much.

Like Spanish moss,

it starts killing the tree!

                                    Brenda Hillman

For a long while yesterday I sat in the numb panic

of forgetting and dunce-cap gawking, as if all that time

holding your i.v. pricked hand didn’t matter, hadn’t happened

at all and here we all are nearly ten years later safe

in the wonder and routine that is your day to day—

I felt my jaw fall slack and then begin, at the ball and joint,

to itch and go taut, as I thought and walked back through

the now thick entwining vines and my kudzu mind that has spent

the last decade growing over the windows I’d kept so carefully

closed but trimmed and clean—and turning back, they are almost

alive they almost fight back being cut through and once

they are they lie sprawled at the heel of my boot and cough

the way you coughed, new at my tight breast, and then spit,

and see, the spit is green and bubbly and shines in the sun

we’re sitting in and then slopes down onto your sluggish flushed

cheek, rising with your limping breath.  And the stillness in the room

is absolute, paused, as if right there a choice was offered, those damn two roads,

and didn’t I feel you go cold, didn’t I, (and don’t I still) sitting

the ninety miles beside you to the NICU, the long stop the tests the waiting-

room glee only a children’s hospital can muster while you, I’m sure

of it baby, floated above yourself, above us all, and chose to come back

down.

Palative Care Said the Blind Woman To the Sighted Man Holding Her Breast

Palative Care

Said the Blind Woman

to the Sighted Man

Holding Her Breast

My moon is cut perfectly in two

the dark blind side up in the sky

where all the starlight can’t light it

but can, in all their distances, be

more honest than the still hours

this rising sun allows when she

comes.  Maybe, I wonder, maybe

the moon and her robes of gravity

were given when the creator pulled

away, after being called back

to wherever creators are called back

and there was an anxious patting

of pockets and a search for some

sign and when she touched her

mammoth breast she pulled it away

kneaded it back into shape, and hung

it above us, giving it to us so we'd feel

dizzy when we looked up at the mad
whirl before everything

went black.  It’s absurd, yes, ok,

to think this lit rock is the old façade

of an ancient ruin, ok, sure, but listen,

you’d be spinning off into noplace

without her, you and your pissy little

stream, so sit down and don’t look

up.  She’s there, I know, and shit!

I’m blind.  See? Ha! I look just

like the one who left all those time-

less times ago.  You’ve unbuttoned me,

see?  You’re holding it all that cold sun-

light in the palm of your hand.

Wisp of Will

Wisp of Will

            …how far the theories have gone

to suggest what these bright appearances

portend in the eye of the mind where we know

from the beginning that the darkness

is beyond us there is no explaining

the dark it is only the light

that we keep feeling a need to account for

                                    “The Marfa Lights”

                                    W. S. Merwin

I’ve never been that far south-

west.  We went straight down
from Boulder to Amarillo,

and then straight across

to the Grand Canyon.

Or straight is how it felt

at the time, as though we had

tunnel vision. 

And even so

it was a long time ago

and with another man and when

I’m remembering, sure, it’s a

light, a burn and a fist, a match

continuously lit and snuffed

on the soft of the inside

of the thigh, or, metaphorically,

the wet cheek beside the ground

down teeth.  It’s the bit part

healing over and over, the way

a Greek god surrenders his liver

or another, married

to his stone, pushes and pauses all the way

to a top he never sees only to watch 

(maybe sometimes he doesn’t watch)

it let go of him and roll and roll

and roll away.  The bottom

is there, only from where he stands

the clouds won’t allow it.  I want

Sisyphus to be a woman, or a cross

dresser at least, maybe a trans-

vestite, or better still, hermaphrodite.

Because watching that stone

is so much like marrying without

balls or imagination, without so much

as a sigh or a shrug after a while,

its stepping down again, every day,

toward alight that's almost always

dark.  

But see (now that’s

funny, because who does) knowing is

eyes on the soles of the feet,

a knowing our eyes in our head

rejects, fools us about.  My feet knew

more about his knuckle and fist

and what he’d force into the tight

dry spaces than my eye did.  The feet saw

it coming.  And I walked them down

anyway, into his seductive cuffs.

                        This isn’t supposed

to be about that.  It’s supposed to be

about little lights that come up out

of the ground, lights the poet saw

and wrote about, lights that glow

against the quilt of black, glow and float

or maybe just hover the way choices

hover.  When we see them, when we let

our feet, without socks or shoes,

come back to us from where they've been

without us, even though we’re attached

(like I was when I walked down

that patch of grass that was a marriage

aisle--legs and torso, arms and head,

we went through all the I do’s…)

and something pinched my feet.  

The shoes were too tight.  And after that

they’d throb when I woke up

after a complicated negotiation

with him.  Pads on fire.  Heels turned

to crust.  They’d feel as though they’d

been stalked,  they’d slip by in the dark

after he’d go by as though he were parted

air, the way they wanted to the first time

but I had those tight shoes on

and the sun was in my face.

And I was too far west

and the stars on earth only floated

like will-o-the-wisps, and I wasn't smart

enough to know that what was 

happening was happening.  I just 

followed the stone.

To The Banished Children of Eve

To The Banished Children of Eve

It seemed, for some reason known only to you,

though enough time has gone by that I even

doubt that, you came to think the rosary beads

were evil, or in the very least, a sinful thing

to do, and so when you caught me one day

half way through the third decade, full of grace

dripping and dribbling from my bottom lip

you’d of liked to rip the whole twine and line

out of my hands and pull every black bead

out, pull the way you’d pulled my hair when

I was small, when you wanted, oh hell, I don’t know

what you wanted, but it seemed as easy

for you to grab and wrap a braid around

your fist and fingers as it was for me to hold

a small worn brown crucifix and all those Our

Fathers Hail Marys and Glory Bes.  What was

harder for me was focusing on an intention,

what to pray for without seeming too selfish,

which mystery to float off with while the raft

of my words navigated your moods and the sound

of your feet on the stairs.  So there was Joyful.

And Luminous. And Sorrowful.  And Glorious.

And to be honest, I never got past Sorrow.  And

maybe that is too dramatic, too convenient, but I

was blind to any happy martyr.  In the end I didn’t

pray at all, I just held those round as buckshot beads

beneath the covers and moved my lips in the dark.

And the little crucifix, smooth with worry,

was a mark in my palm.  And my mouth, well,

with all that not-praying in the dark, waiting for you

until you never eventually came, shed a skin

and another and another, while Hail Mary held out
a lamb caught in the thick wet bog. 

Winter Afternoons

Winter Afternoons

                        After Emily Dickinson’s 320

You’re on the bathroom floor, they found you

there, or maybe just a she this time, one home

health care nurse, come to bathe you, soap

your hair.  I think you'd spent a lot of time there

on that floor, because near the toilet little pricks

of cinders pock the linoleum—its old oil self

startled for the brief heat.  What didn’t land

on your housecoat went down and stuck with

a ssssssssszt.

I didn’t ask, I should have asked, but I didn’t

how you came to be there in a sprawl.  The shock?

No, it wasn’t shock.  It was a long exhale, an out

and out that still came days later, your ten in ICU

the next ten in the morgue,  the crematory.

I wanted to be there to wait while you went in,

like I used to do when I’d take you

to your routine doctor’s visits and listen while

they tried to medicate your mysterious diseases.

You’re off the drink but somehow the booze went

solid and all you needed with the little cylinder

or lozenge or tip of your pinky sized pill was a little

water and all your pain, real and ghost, would be

suffocated like the new puppies you found early

in your marriage, how their pure-bred bitch

covered them with a blanket and lay down on them,

the warm weight of her something they took

for granted and never, not once, tried to get away

from.  Would I were a bathroom floor, or more,

you the floor and I your anorexic body, sprawled

like a crime scene, on top of all the constellations

your living ash could make—and come, without

fail, every night, clouds or not, moon or not,

and be an entirely new creation, the breath of gods

flaring out and in of brand new nostrils, brand new

lungs, brand new everything, and all that skin

you slipped out of at the end, just rise in a wind,

wind our first new-born gulp after we’ve swayed,

lost our grip, swallowed the last of a just

filled prescription.