Teahouse of the Almighty (7 page)

Lowering your x into a tub of warm water, they

scrubbed you with stinging soap, sang songs filled

with light and lyric, then dabbed you dry with those

brutal sickbed towels, avoiding the left nipple,

smashed before it began. Wrapping you in the stiff garb

of virgins, they told you that you were healed,

there in that stark room of beeping machines

and blood vials and sterilized silver, they built

you a child's body and coaxed your battered heart back inside.

Girl

x. The violation left. x

you blind and x voiceless

And they braided your hair every day, gently,

the ritual insane, strands over, under, through, over,

under, through, fingers locked in languid weave,

until the same of it all brought your voice back.

The nurses cheered, told you they'd found a cure

for history, that the unreal would refuse to be real.

Soon you'll be able to see again, they whispered.

I know you never meant to be ungrateful, my rib,

when you rose up half and growled this grace:

that's

that's

O.K.
you

can keep

my

eyes

FORGOTTEN IN ALL THIS

In the scarred fresco Joseph

is the outline, eluding.

Under close eye, the rotted color

may reveal a beard,

a muted and battered halo,

one sullen eye cast toward

the wrapped and luminous swaddle

that became the world,

damning what the world was before.

His wife, earth hips in flawed marble

or thick tempera, is spoiled and yes,

blessed silly, already beyond him,

not needing to acknowledge a mere man

etched as afterthought among sheep.

What's left of his head is always in his hands.

Crinkled and cracking backdrop

of
Sacra Familia,
he is tagged dispensable

whenever the three are considered.

The child and mother are polished,

redeemed, lifted almost to breathing.

Their color deafens. He is crutch,

inn searcher, tonal balance, ampersand,

weary of squinting against the rays of the son.

Artist, look again at him.

Give him back his eyes,

the burnished cheek.

Draw him whirling, furious about all this.

Make him holy beyond canvas,

chisel, and the saying so.

Brushstroke him a mouth that moves,

with teeth that clench and assert.

Let his wails wash over us,

we who rendered him no brighter than hill and oxen,

we who always knew his name but never who he was.

DOWN 4 THE UP STROKE

for Danny Solis

But you have poetry,
you say.

And if you can tell me what poetry is,

where the line is drawn

between the beauty and the breathing

of breath into something to make it beautiful,

I will claim poetry as my own.

Poets, when last breath sought to seduce,

your mojo flashed skinned nerve to the open air.

You bitched and cajoled until I was pissed enough

to assign you the task of my wounds.

You said
Patricia,

come to us if the world bleeds through.

You drove in from the city and backhanded me

with your clunky rhymes, your limp couplets,

your falterings, your leaps for the sky,

your lean and joyless works in progress.

You jumped up and down on my heart,

yelling
beat beat,

when I was June's only sin, you screeched

beat beat,

when there was nothing I could do but be a liar

flat under everyone, you angled storm boot heels

at my chest until the irritation warmed dead muscle

and pulled it onto the dance floor. Ignore the mic static.

What unflinching poems spring from the mouths

of the almost dead. I could never love me like this.

WOMEN ARE TAUGHT

I'm convinced it's a man's smell that pulls us in—

faux leather and spiced soap, splashes of lemon

and Old Spice, the odd oil tinging his sweat.

As women, we were designed to wither beneath

the mingled stench of them. As a woman, I was

yo, yo, baby work that big ass, you must want

designed

what I got

to wither

c'mon honey just let daddy stick it in a little bit

beneath

bitch of course i love you i give you money don't i

Why else would i cage myself in glorious raiment

of spandex and lace, paint my panting the hues

of burn, twist my voice from madam to smoke?

Why else, once he has left me, do I bury my face

in the place his sex has pressed, inhale

what he has left, and pray to die there?

On the day I married, I was such porcelain,

delicate and poised to shatter. I was unflinching,

sure of my practiced vows,

already addicted to the sanctity of bondage.

I was an unfurled ballad in a scoop-necked

sheath carved of sugar. And him on my arm,

grinning like a bear, all sinew and swagger.

Bibles were everywhere. Dizzied by rote,

I stared at the gold rope around my finger.

He owned me.

And that felt nice.

That felt right.

the first time i hit her

I thought the loose tooth a temporary nightmare

the second time i hit her

He cried himself to sleep, and that was nice,

that was right

the third time i hit her

He counted my scars and whispered
never again

baby never again

When
i'd die without you

turned to
i'll kill you if you ever leave me

I bristled like a hound in heat, I didn't

understand the not being aroused, when

let's get away

turned to

you'll never get away

such heat rippled my

belly such crave in me screeching
walk run run run

run

i etched a thin line into the throat of her running

run

i stalked streets just a breath behind her

run

i
shattered our son's skull with a shotgun

run

i wanted her dead.

My first thought as he jammed the

still smoking barrel into my breastbone

her first thought

as the blade mapped my chest, the

hammer sliced the air toward my hair

the bullet pushed me through a plate glass window

my last thought
you won't believe this

my last thought

you really won't believe this

my last thought

was

he must really

love me

LOOK AT 'EM GO

for my granddaughter Mikaila

Hard-sewn, soft-belly, huff, hip swing,

teeny woman catapult, dings in the walls

of your body. I know your scars, badges

earned in the grave pursuit of science—

jump rope whips along a curve of calf,

toes stubbed purple, tender uncolored

patches of skin woven shut over your

small traumas. Wily dervish, you flip,

hurtle, fly, daily rattle your soft spine,

send your bones to the wailing places.

This is play in the age of
Grandma, who

knocked those buildings down?
This is

8 years old in the age of could-die-soon.

This is life as collision and scrape, hard

lessons in the poetics of risk. Daring

the world to harm us, you pull hard

on my hand.
Grandma, let's run!
We laugh

and trip as the sidewalk sniffs our skin

and stars along our path flame shut.

Die fast, die slow, die giggling, die anyway.

Our speed tempts the Reaper as I shelter

you in this first death, the loss of our throats.

STOP THE PRESSES

My job is to draw the pictures no one can voice,

to soothe and bellow toward the numbed heart,

to breathe in your chronicles, discuss them out

in lines weak enough for you to read and swallow.

My mouth is a jumble of canine teeth, I bite only

at the official whistle. My job is sexy leads for the

bones clattering in your closet, to sing you sated

each night with a forgettable soundtrack of paper

and ink. I am neat, easily folded, a sifter of truth

born to be burned. I count your dead, fathom their

stories, bless them with long, flexible histories

and their final names. There are no soft stanzas

in this city of curb sleep and murdered children.

We need soft words for hard things, this silk

brushing the inevitability of rock. Birth truth in

this way, just once. Craft the news and overcome

all that you ever were—a reason to turn the page.

WHAT YOU PRAY TOWARD

“The orgasm has replaced the cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.”

      
—
Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966

I.

Hubbie 1 used to get wholly pissed when I made

myself come.
I'm right here!,
he'd sputter, blood

popping to the surface of his fuzzed cheeks,

goddamn it, I'm right here!
By that time, I was

in no mood to discuss the myriad merits of my

pointer, or to jam the brakes on the express train

slicing through my blood. It was easier to suffer

the practiced professorial huff, the hissed invectives

and the cold old shoulder, liver-dotted, quaking

with rage. Shall we pause to bless professors and

codgers and their bellowed, unquestioned ownership

of things? I was sneaking time with my own body.

I know I signed something over, but it wasn't that.

II.

No matter how I angle this history, it's weird,

so let's just say
Bringing Up Baby
was on the telly

and suddenly my lips pressing against

the couch cushions felt spectacular and I thought

wow this is strange, what the hell, I'm 30 years old,

am I dying down there is this the feel, does the cunt

go to heaven first, ooh, snapped river, ooh shimmy

I had never had it never knew, oh I clamored and

lurched beneath my little succession of boys I cried

writhed hissed, ooh wee, suffered their flat lapping

and machine-gun diddling their insistent c'mon girl

c'mon until I memorized the blueprint for drawing

blood from their shoulders, until there was nothing

left but the self-satisfied liquidy snore of he who has

rocked she, he who has made she weep with script.

But this, oh Cary, gee Katherine, hallelujah Baby,