MRS. DUMPTY

The last time the doctors gave up
I put the pieces together
and bought him a blue wool jacket, a shirt
and a tie with scribbles of magenta,
brown buckle shoes. I dressed him
and sat him down
with a hankie in his pocket folded into points.
Then a shell knit slowly
over his sad starched heart.

He'd laugh and dangle his long legs and call out,
What a fall that was!
And I'd sing the refrain,
What a fall!

And now he's at my door again, begging
in that leaky voice,
and I start wiping the smear
from his broken face.

-- from Mrs. Dumpty, University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.

TIRED SEX

We're trying to strike a match in a matchbook
that has lain all winter under the woodpile:
damp sulphur
on sodden cardboard.
I catch myself yawning. Through the window
I watch that sparrow the cat
keeps batting around.

Like turning the pages of a book the teacher assigned --

You ought to read it, she said.
It's great literature.

-- from Mrs. Dumpty, University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.

THE KISS

There was a ghost at our wedding,
the caterer's son,
who drowned that day.

Like every bride I was dressed
in hope so sharp
it tore open
my tight-sewn fear.

You kissed me under the wedding canopy,
a kiss that lasted a few beats longer
than the usual,
and we all laughed.

We were promising: the future
would be like the present,
even better, maybe.
Then your heel came down
on the glass.

We poured champagne
and opened the doors to the garden
and danced
a little drunk, all of us,

as the caterer made the first cut,
one firm stroke, then
dipped his knifeblade
in the water.

-- from Mrs. Dumpty, University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.

THE VALLEY OF THE DEAD

    l

No one feeds the dead anymore.
No one leaves them juniper berries and melon seeds
in an alabaster bowl.
They have stopped hunting in the ochre marshes.

They used to live forever
on painted wheat.
The sky was flat; the sun skimmed across it
in a boat. At that latitude

there is no twilight. The gods
with their beaked hunger --
falcon, jackal, hawk --
wait, enormous, on the walls.

    2

In the long leisure
of heaven

there is no friction, the hand
goes on waving the fan of ostrich feathers,

the ivory bird is called back
as witness

and the chairs with their stiff
clawed feet. Nothing

happens only once.
We perform the past over and over

until we get it right.

    3

Whatever you gave me, I used it up right away
for breathing.
That's why nothing is left but amulets,
red paint flaking off the potsherds,
Isis holding out her naked breasts
in both hands --

your hands. Sun edges in
the broken shutter --
                                The rest

turned into body and bread.

The pain is historical, silted under
other sediments,
and it doesn't hurt.

Whatever you gave me, I made it serve,
I couldn't save it
for later. That's why only your handprints
are left, faintly visible,
pressed into the clay.

-- from The Past Keeps Changing, Sheep Meadow Press, 1992.

RISING TO MEET IT

Pain is the salty element.

All that night I lay
tethered to my breathing. To the pain,
the fixed clock-stare of the walls,
the fingers
combing my tangled hair.
Ride out the waves, the doctor said.

The first time I touched a man,
what startled me more than the pleasure
was knowing what to do.
I turned to him with
a motion so firm it must have been
forming inside me
before I was born.

I was swimming upstream, the body
solid, bucking for breath, slippery,
wet. An ocean
rolled off my shoulders.

Tonight, strapped to the long night, I miss
the simple
pain of childbirth --
                                       No, not the pain
but that rising to meet it like a body
reaching out in desire, buoyant, athletic,
sure of its power.

-- from The Past Keeps Changing, Sheep Meadow Press, 1992.