Y

Little letter I could not love.  Vowel & consonant, chromosome & question.  How frugal and elusive you have been!  Always the middleman: xyz, xy, never the workers or the bourgeoisie.  Also the musicman: xylophone & lyre.  At times I find your histrionics almost unbearable—a new age of womyn & wyne.  Too haughty for the twenty-fifth place, you stand like V on a stilt, on a pedestal stair, touting your yowling message.  Inverted tripod.  Impotent slingshot.  (David’s one-time triumphant tool.)  And what a spy you are, your cunning infiltrations: dys-trophy, dys-functional, dys-phoria.  How could I ever catch you?  Stealthy somnambulist, chameleon of stick limbs & curlicues.  You reduce nouns to improper adjectives with these easy recipes: smirk-y, pith-y, weight-y, greed-y.  Lad into lady.  That’s your fix, your sing-song-y resonance.  Usurper of the second person.  Pseudonym for stranger.  You and yours assaulting me and mine through triangle lips split open.  isosceles.  Take your tuning-fork face and turn it into the light.  Make your inquiry, outspoken and asinine.  Yawn, yang, yammer.  An active force in the universe.  Tell me I’m boring you.  Call me yellow.  Tempt me with yams, sweetened to marshmallow pudding.  Or come in second: axis, coordinate, unknown quantity.  Occasionally, impressed with your arrogance, I’ve let you yo-yo me—lift up my skirts, my songs, buoy me again in the wrong direction.  Invention: the crafty voice in the back of the head, making suggestions.  Or the picture on the grade school wall, building associations.  Y is for yak, a long-haired, humped Tibetan ox, and you who are never what you are.

*Winner of the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry, 2004 (Albert Goldbarth, judge); published in Another Chicago Magazine, Volume 44+45, Text and Image, 2004

Return from Presque Isle

Like a lover at the outset—sun

un-eclipsed by cloud—pleasure resting infinite

in possibility—so rare a lack

the hypothetical act by which one is, hypothetically,

altered.  And so this morning and this

afternoon and especially as the evening

came upon us with its plush, red mouth—

I consented to a wish, as once, beneath

your body, I consented to a sleep surpassing

consciousness.  And when I woke, alive

in a land without water, without the gull-birds,

the broken shells, and that stench of fish that

slowly (still) fades from my clothes, I thought

for a moment, “We will die here.”  Now, the night

blushing purple beside us, the moon rising sleek

and cat-like beyond us, and your hand curving

a crescent to the side of my face, I think

for a moment, we will live.

*Published in Issue #154 of Cimarron Review, Winter 2006.

Law of Parsimony

As I have studied science,
I have studied men, and loved them also—
    my cursory diligence, abstracted tenderness:
        in the morning, wake to heresy or sorrow.

It takes me awhile, being back in the world again:
       longings unspooled and artfully rethreaded

It takes me awhile to remember even this is optional

But what I admire—
what fetches me time and again to the laboratories
      and the ball fields and the solitary morning strolls
      of Man and Dog or Man with Coffee in Hand and Dog
        
 is the aspiration of both disciples and discipline:
            the science of men, the men of science:
                          toward simplicity, precision.

It takes me awhile to remember that mating is no longer required

And I think of the beauty pageant
          when I was only thirteen, of my mother winding
               my hair over hot rollers’ sticky spikes
               my body shrinking right before our eyes
              That was Ockham’s Razor also

shaving my legs until, bare and bony, they bled
         stripping the hair away from my under-arms
                and the tender tops of my toes

Turning sallow then, my breath tucked in,
      Vaselined teeth and yellowing nails: cut down to size
       pink lace and white ruffles cuffing me tight
                      scrutiny of a Marriott’s worth of strangers
                                 That was Ockham’s Razor also

It takes me awhile to let the tears drain out of my lungs:
     to breathe again: alive and exonerated

And I think of how it really did look simple on paper:
       a marriage license for sixty bucks and bumming
       a cigarette from the city worker watching the door

“What’d ya want to get married for?”
         with his scruffy chin and his pretty eyes and his patience,
                   waiting for me to reply

A slew of answers:
         Because it’s easier to vote the party line
        Because even cable is never a la carte
       Because I’m a writer: I understand about sentences,
             dependent clauses, conditional and subordinate terms
     And because I have memorized precisely what I am supposed to want
          (They don’t call it a steel trap for nothin’)

Something about parents and needing to please them, or defy them;
       something about safety and needing to seek it at all costs;
           something about other people understanding that I had been wanted,
               and sought after, and heartily desired

It takes me awhile to remember, under penalty of perjury, the old Natural Law    

What can be said of the beloved: percussion of her body’s praise, deep
        mysterious music that undergirds these syllables but cannot be translated
              into speech: syncopation, improvisation…

And what can be said of the world, with its bristles and Brill-o pads and
            either/or boxes: that the simplest answer is always the best? that
                  accuracy can be calculated, quantified and contained?

What then of desire’s capacity to surprise us, of the improbable majesty
        of the willow-tree and the comforting disquietude of the storm?

The science is impersonal, without eyes.  The men are lovely sometimes, but trained
         the way snipers stalk through the wild: a single target in a circular outline:
               circumference no greater than a dime…bull’s eye

It takes me awhile: to collect myself and my follies and the ivy-twined inquiries of my mind.

It takes me awhile.   She knows this.   In her own intricacy: unabashed and labyrinthine: she sees.