from Heroic Age

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Spring’s shoulder stayed winter.  Her feet were yams.  When she curves her back for a rake, you want to jump on it and relax, smoke a cigarette and watch the sun for the first time in dark months of rooms.  Her feet are yams, ankles held together by vines.  She wears a black scarf, black skirt and black cardigan over a black blouse.  On her legs gray lintballs climb beneath her skirt.  Midwife to the soil, she’s dressed for the Grand Closing.  You want to hug her but you don’t.  She’ll turn oak post, steel beam, concrete pillar.  The transition will be unbearable.  There's work to be done.

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It was an automobile.  A steel trap.  A contusion on a sharp left.  They brought it home, put it in the bathroom in a box on a bed of hay.  She refused to go to school.  Leave the house.  She slept under the sink.  Her friends forgot her.  Her notebook forgot to tell her.  Forgot to explain it all.  To remind her.  She brought gifts, carrots and lettuce, cabbage and a bowl of water.  One morning next week, nothing but the hay.  It escaped, they said, right through the open door; back with its family now.  In the evening her mother added salt above the boiling pot.  When ready, she cut the flame and drifted upstairs.  He stuck a fork in it.  She sat on her hands at the table.  Herod said: “Eat it."

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Don’t tell Papa, she pleaded.  But Papa was told.  He gathered the linens, bleach and a washtub from the basement.  She stuck her hands in the tub.   The linens whipped up a whirlpool; grabbed her wrists.  They tried to pull her in and drag her to the bottom.  She struggled to rescue her bloody hands.  Something was drowning in there.  Something small, a bird’s heart, a song.  Later, her mother hung the line.  She wrote in her notebook: I’m a woman now.

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It keeled over in its own dung.  She gathered it up, held it to her breast beneath her coat.  People wanted to know why her heart appeared to have grown.  On the bus they snatched glances, whispered to their partners, snickered at the back.  She stepped off and walked through the city unseen.  When the vet had a look, he told her to roast it.

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I came to kill, to give birth.  I came to wipe things clean.  I came to purify.  You’ll know me by the shine on my boots, the sparkle at the ends of my fingertips.  By the breadth of my wings, the cut of my suit.  When I speak, even the deaf have to pretend to be listening.  Even the dead, the unborn.  When I speak, love hurts like it's supposed to.