Translation Theory
We can only access what is real through the mediation of language,
but that doesn't mean if you stick a knife through your chest
you're not going to get hurt. What I mean: our bodies
get in the way of our souls all the time. It's not the words,
it's the gesture of them. Going through us like bullets
through trees. Not the little birds falling to the ground,
but their falling. Not their falling, but something in the stretch
they have to fall. When two people walk into an open field,
each holding a pistol, facing each other, walking backwards,
counting down, it's not each other they're shooting at,
but the distance between them. I would rip out my heart
to give to you but that's not what I'm trying to say.
What am I trying to say? When I was a kid
my dad punched my bedroom door and the tear in the paint
looked like a face. I wanted to be good, said the face.
I believe you, I said, I believe you, Dad, I do.
After the Flood
Every day when I was five
I asked my mother if it was my birthday,
and just when I began to believe I was
the only person who had never been born
I came downstairs to her holding
a single balloon in her hand. I do not remember
the color of it, or what her face looked like,
or what she had said if anything at all, but I remember
thinking that I knew something more about the world—
there had been a time before me, and then
I had, inadvertently, begun. And now a balloon,
made both invisible and permanent by memory
could mean everything, and descending those stairs
that opened onto a day uniquely my own, descending was still
an action like any other, and meant back then
an entrance into something open and full of light
like the kitchen of our old house in the morning, like
the front door, and not an unwilling return
into some dark and flooded basement
of the heart, my heart, which I believed
years later was my real home.
And when I lived there, by which I mean in the flood
I lay belly up, waiting for whoever it was
to be finished fucking me, I would feel humiliated
not by however my body was being used
but if, at the end, he would pay for my cab home;
home being loosely defined, in those days,
as a place away from men who I hoped,
being older, would be more dangerous
and maybe kill me or something and then I could leave
the world the same way I entered it: with all the mercy
of having no choice. Though in the end
all that age meant was that
they looked weary in lamplight and it almost seemed
I was offering them whatever little mercy
I had left in me instead. But please don't get me wrong.
It wasn't always like this: though I don't remember
what we talked about, ever, or how we came to meet,
a boy comes to mind, sometimes,
who drove me across the Verrazzano-Narrows
Bridge on accident, when we were trying to go
nowhere, not Staten Island,
and immediately turning back around
paid the toll twice, while I sat in the passenger's seat
and laughed until I cried, and though when I left him
that year, going home for the summer, I told all my friends
It's not like we're gonna get married, or anything,
I still told all of them, the story coming out of me
involuntarily, as though it could demand, somehow,
to be born. And even if, after I came back,
I didn't call him and we never spoke again,
I at least know why I didn't: because at that point
what had gone between us I could not afford
to ruin. Like when my mother once,
sometime between that boy
and my year of no birthdays,
when I knew something would soon go wrong
inside me and still wanted then to try
to fix it—suggested, outside the psychiatrist's office,
not looking at me, that we die,
right then, together. And I thought of how
every night when I was five
she would silently kneel in front of me
on the bathroom floor, brushing my teeth,
holding my mouth open, carefully, with one hand.
Love Story of Beginning and End
I had a boyfriend who once told me
it's more humane to shoot and eat deer,
showing me a video about the inevitability
of their prolonged starvation in the wild:
If I were a deer, he said—
I thought this only happened
in movies, but he was the first person I ever saw
pound the floor with his fists
when he sobbed, and begged me not to go.
My friend once told me
the story of the father of a friend who one day
went to Brazil on business forever
and not only that, but found it in him
to call his wife, and tell her so:
I've found a new woman; I'm never coming back
or something to that effect, as my friend relayed it
to me, and I remember wondering how else
it could have gone. What he could have done
differently. What he should have.
For some reason I'll never know, my mother
loved to tell anyone who would listen the story
of my piano teacher's wife, who one day
went for a hike alone
and had a stroke. Though she was healthy,
my mother would quickly clarify,
and it was not a question
of health, but a faulty vein inside of her
she never could have known. And though
my mother told it like a cautionary tale,
how could it have been, unless the moral of
the story was what Rilke said about how the end
grows inside of you like a fruit.
I used to think this was true. That people
wore their end on them, unknowable
as skin, and as visible, and then I sat on his couch
for the last time, the couch of that heroic
hunter of dying deer, and thought how
there was a beginning to this,
though I couldn't find it
and I would have to get off
that couch and go home one way
or another, and that staring at his hands
I could not imagine how.
After I walked through his door
for the last time, he left the city
and it was no longer his door. And did it start
when we met? In the car, when I was a child,
my mother would often cry in the driver's seat
and ask God why he had punished her
with me, and when I began
to cry, too, the first time it happened,
she turned and asked me what I was
crying for and I remember thinking earlier that day
we had laid on the kitchen floor
together, drawing pictures on butcher paper,
and I had messed up while drawing
our house and the more I tried
to fix it it only got worse
until eventually to keep me
from tears of frustration my mother took a red crayon
and drawing flames over it said look
now it's just a fire and as we sat there
on that couch I remembered
he did not only hunt deer, that boy,
he also loved watching birds, and would show me
videos of birds of prey moving in for the kill
in slow motion, making the osprey's sudden
plunge into water suddenly possible,
every beat of the wing, every drop of water
clarified to a moment of its own
and as he kept asking me what happened I thought
how I wanted the answer, too.
Last Spring
The same year I starved myself I tried
to sleep with someone new and older
each week, and my mother told me
about citrus trees: how they can sense
when they're about to die, and begin
to flower desperately, the fruit already overripe
before it hits the ground, the inside rotten
as it bursts open—the body, when hungry,
swells, and all that year I looked so full
of a nothing that longed to be enough, standing
on a scale in someone's cramped bathroom
to find I weighed as much as I did
when I was twelve, then having no choice
but to leave the bathroom and fuck him and then
someone else and so on, the way as a child
I didn't know how to draw faces or hands
so all my people had no choice but to be born
with their heads buried in their folded arms,
the way gravity pulls a fruit to the ground and splits it open
like a sentence, as though the dying tree were trying
to leave nothing unsaid, which is why I told my mother
about that year and she answered
with a nature fact, to show me, I guess,
she and the world already knew how the story went,
looking at my body how I might have looked
at my own hunger, if it could have stood
outside of me, ashamed, and begged me
to let it back in, or maybe like she was
the thing not allowed in, my body
a burning house that, before it belonged
to a blank and inexorable fire,
had once been hers.
