My uterus is crowded with crab.
They clack and pinch. I bleed.
They scuttle down unused corridors and escape.
One is a small hard presence behind my clavicle.
This summer the doctors will come again
and again with their torches.
And I who have loved so much the more
will study the lesson of less.
The shaved head.
The open hand.
The loud silence of twilight.
When House was new it asked for filling.
We complied with staples and treats and whimsy and hope, in their turns.
Repujado’s required tools are good for nothing else. Parts of looms lay
akimbo in the nook upstairs. Clothes of outdated sizes rotate to the back
of ample closets. Business cards not used, now supplanted by better. Instruments
upgraded. Posters outgrown. A chest with toys untouched for years is colorful
behind the vacuum. Hats.
When Home comes it will demand spaciousness.
Surfaces easily wiped. Doors wide enough for chairs and beds and the wagons
with the tubes and beeps. One dresser with three drawers. The clothes coming back
from the laundry may not be ours, but we will wear them.
Breathe in. Breath out. We open our hands, palms full of oxygen and memories.
The city surrounds me as intimately as night,
lights on late,
streets shower-slick and shining.
Amos Lee sings about the spirit
in my right ear,
and I’m singing with him. Loud.
Tears for some reason.
There’s such a small space to wedge all this into.
I crack open the car door and push,
water-borne into florescence
and the hum of the machinery
into which I screw my lamp.
A humor, though not as humorous as one might hope,
you sit in the shade of my liver,
melancholy incubating in your bitter sack.
You taketh away my French fries and my mayonnaise.
When I sin against you
you waketh me in the witching hour and
maketh me to sit up through the night.
Oh, frost –
Oh, woolly caterpillar –
Oh, harbinger of my imminent winter –
have mercy on me
as you strip from me the luxuries of the flesh.
We are not dealing with trivialities.
I don’t care about the shape of your skin
or the mechanics of insertion
or the posture of excretion.
I have chased that mercury across the linoleum before,
and I know how little it all means.
I am coming for something more essential
than your liver.
I knew it worried him,
no matter what he said.
I knew he thought I’d go back to her.
Even in the beginning,
when things were good,
he’d ask questions.
Later on,
when things got bad,
I’d cut off my fingernails
and come home late.
Tonight’s yoga lesson: Backbends! Energizing! Heart opening!
The teacher’s confession: She hates backbends. And she’s not good at them. In practice. She can give you plenty of theory and information about your anatomy, but that doesn’t get her hands back to her heels in camel or her hips off the ground in upward bow. She’ll skip bow, then. Maybe offer it up as an option for those “who regularly use it in their practice.” And she’ll teach half camel, which she can actually do, though she rarely enjoys it. And so the class plan comes together, a gumbo of knowledge and reality, seasoned with a pinch of shame.
And so the teacher learns: Not the poses, though god knows she tries. She learns it doesn’t matter. She stands at the door of the classroom, all limitation and insecurity, and she loves her students. Casually, while shaking their hands, she slips them the gift of happy imperfection.
This rock against which I throw myself,
causing soft bruises to seep through my thinning flesh,
the one I can not manage to lever away to see my path ahead,
the one blocking the sunlight of my solitary future
is
the boulder against which I rest, exhausted from the world,
safe from glare and invasion,
the one I rub cheek and hand over,
intimate and undulating as flesh.
He is telling her about a trip
he is about to take.
He is leaving out anything that might hurt her.
Who he is taking.
What he feels.
Why he left her.
His voice is carefully casual.
She nods, smiles absently.
She traces the barely raised ink
of her Pepsi bottle
with an unpolished fingernail,
scraping slightly,
finding no gap,
no place to begin its destruction.
‘for your husband shall be your longing, though he have dominion over you.’ Genesis 3:16
So this is the plan:
this throb,
this molten river coursing
from nipple to belly
as she watches the husband return
from the garden.
She kneads floury biscuits at the window,
an amethyst bracelet of bruise
appearing and disappearing into her cotton sleeve.
And this:
this portion of spirits the husband allows himself,
erasing ache and knowledge.
On the way to lunch
he calls each restless beast by name
and tucks his bottle into its straw cradle
knowing he’ll return.
Late, in their unforgiving bed,
she rends his back,
he pounds her prow of bone,
longing.
Small Poems de Terre 