from Of Turning

16.

But I was hot inside a closet, trying to peel a shirt off my back, and it would not be removed. It held on as if it really was my skin. I’d wanted to return to the room where the others were sprawled on couches, laughing quietly. They were waiting, but not for me, for the candidate, her purposeful step. It was as if they did not even know I was absent.

Hotter, sweating, I was desperate with the effort to undress. Then my phone rang. It was Anna. She’d been called to her mother who was dying. The care-worker had called to tell her to come just as she, Anna, had been preparing for the manifestation. The manifestation was to be held on the steps of the Capitol where people would demand the end of killing. As the words flew from their mouths like ghosts from out of graves, the killing continued. There is no time, said the people, in which there is no killing. And yet, they said, we oppose the killing. It was November. Fallen leaves turned to golden dust under their marching soles and rose in little clouds around their ankles. The people opposing killing joined their voices into song, but the building they sang to was empty. No lights on, no footsteps in hallways, the rooms stripped bare, even of furniture. If one were to gaze over the heads of these manifesting people, one would see, behind them, a shining bay. The sky that day was grey and cold, but the ocean was nonetheless sparkling, as if on another plane of existence. A single sailboat slid from left to right like a woman slicing an apple in half.

Anna on the phone was crying for her mother who had fallen, and I, listening to her cry, sat on the closet floor in my hot, tight, wet clothing, a bar of light under the door, and on the other side, the candidate had arrived. She sat rigid on the edge of her chair. Anna paused in her crying to take a drag from her cigarette. I have to go, she said then, I have to pack my suitcase. After that, I fell asleep. Sadness overcame me. My mother, long dead, appeared seated on her bed. That very morning, she’d left the house with a sense of purpose, rushing, well-dressed, ready. But her day had gone badly, and she’d had to return home early, having been, as she put it, utterly defeated. I sat beside her as she spoke her frustration into her hands. Come on, I said finally, let’s go for a walk. Outside we found the ocean rocking, and we, walking beside it, seemed also to rock, so much so that my mother, who was never very strong in the bodily sense, grabbed hold of my hand. That was when she told me she’d been losing the ability to walk in a straight line. She’d begun to lean, she said, always a bit to the left so that her path kept turning, veering, curving. If not careful, she said, she’d find herself walking only in circles as if she had no ambitions at all. But was there, I asked, gripping her small hand tightly, drawing her close to me so that we might walk steadily forward on the road that bordered the sea, anywhere she was in fact trying to get to? Was there, I said, a particular destination? People, she said, are diminished. You’ll see. She said this as if to hurt me, as if she could not bear my strength even as she relied on it. I will see, I echoed, just as a wind rose and whipped my face. Like a beast, I found myself thinking.

The crack under the closet door went black. The meeting was over. The candidate, and then my colleagues, left the room. And now I was cold, and the clothing slipped easily off me. I opened the closet door and walked, naked, into the darkened meeting room. At the window I stood, leaning my naked body against the cool glass, and looked down onto the city in which my mother did not exist, in which the manifestation no longer raged, against which the ocean pressed, asking to be admitted, asking to rise, and I saw no one.

55.

as a fish in a tank from wall to wall
as the grackle from one tree to the next
with its yellow eye in its cobalt head
when the others like a cloud all at once
as in the dream of the trumpeters trumpeting
in a line behind women who are dancing
raise their invisible instruments
all together toward the invisible sky
as the men from border to border
as the fish in a tank wall to wall
the body overheated in its ordeal
of breath of soil and of shadows
the shadows of words now forgotten
as dresses have been and books
whole books, whole meals, whole people
as toward the mother with her unsteady step
or toward the river carrying the dead
as toward the body inside the body (having been initiated)
as the rain that is searching for the gutter
the gutter that is waiting to receive it
like we wait to receive the inner-touch
when we sometimes remember to remember

64.

From inside the closet

of the questioners.

English names. Like the ones who always know
the location of the well. But now my clothes

now they had fallen from me. I left the closet

to find you.

66.

Waking at two in a headache, she wakes. The world, the available world, entering itself again, describing itself to itself

67.

What are the “ten new things” that signal a violent upheaval as they float out of her open mouth? First the eyes (for crying), then the hands (for touch), there is fruit (red, overripe), a hunk of concrete (the broken) and the salt.

What else? Brightness (for the eyes), cows, the un-cry (this is eight), the walking-with (your child, my child, your mother, mine), and finally, number ten: the song/stone.

69.

Now toward the headache, she turns. She addresses it: I know nothing about you, she says. The womb, sure, the vaginal canal, all that. But, she says to the headache in the howling, its mouth open (its dress of blue-white milk), about you, I know nothing.

She was up. Pushed the heavy door to the stairwell. Went down. Shoved her hands into pockets. Kicked the river, like a thug. She (it was you), broke her fast with her ears. Broke her fist with her. Tears. Moon outrageous in its overflow. A garden of hellebores and hogweed. Throat sore, intestines in a knot, the wind: howling. The people: howling. The temperature: plummeting. Darkness: fading. The people: turning. And from their backs, nothing, nothing.

She with her long tongue (it was me), tongue like a road or a snake or a river, licked at the air between them.

70.

Lungs sway in concert; the trees seem to bob. Was she looking for a way out, a way away (from the revulsions),

the body of the father, the body of the mother?

Through which she might
re-fill

the well, the well, the well?