“
Now reading
The Bones of August
i.
Not to go backward,
not to watch the women
peddling in reverse past the church,
the priest in his black habit
receding from the chapel door.
Not to go backward,
the bones of August
becoming the bones of March,
branch of dogwood
picked clean by frost.
Not to say Yes
when asked the question
all women wait to hear,
Are you anything
like your mother?
Not to be photographed in her dress
like a saint
carrying the instrument of her martyrdom,
Agnes, and her tray
of breasts—
or to throw the bouquet into the grave
where Bartholomew hides
with his bloody knife.
Not to burn
half the house down—
and build half the house up.
Not to forgive
the bad child
when even the bad house
is forgiven. Not to care,
not to carry the bones of August
into September, foiled with redness
and nothing to squander
but the buds of spring
dormant in their boughs.
Not to ask, Did you
love her? and leave
the answer in the ground,
where everything difficult
is buried.
ii.
Attend the dead,
then welcome the bride—
backward, as Jews do,
reading Hebrew,
right to left.
First the mourning,
then the celebration.
Backward, taking off
the beautiful face
of forgetting,
two names with the same face—
all this time
a woman waiting inside me
to marry.
Invisible, impermanent,
windmill girl in her cage
of breath,
insect girl in her element:
impenetrable shell,
putting on
the beautiful face of forgetting—
Fury Sybil Isis
one of us
wakes in her
graveyard of guilt,
filamentary as fiber optics,
one of us sleeps on
in the temple, lulled
by the metronomic
pulse of longing—
Did you love her? Are you anything?
That other girl is dead.
That other girl is dead.
What else can be said
about that other girl?
iii.
Same as mine,
skin of her hands
laid over the ivory bones,
dark map
of the body— Yes—
it was dark,
but I was darker
on the inside.
When she was young
she was “a great beauty,”
in the same sense
that “a roomful of adults”
is rarely ever.
I was never
like her, flattered
like a map
under glass,
slender as an axle
in a turbine—
enigma relic:
feet of steel, legs of wood,
cabinet of curiosity.
Even her reflection
in a spoon
was beautiful.
iv.
Labor into longing:
wild enthusiasm
of the dynamo engine
working in reverse—
more power
in the leaf of a flower
than the paw of a bear.
Is it necessary
to remember
absolutely everything?
Golden hour on the birch-
brailled bark,
weathered barn stacked
with malignant logs,
sweet mulch
of aether /ore
in the morning air.
We hung drapes
over the mirrors,
they were flowered, too—
her bouquet a cabbage,
assembled by a florist
from 120 roses
Incandescent light
flattened their petals,
made lace of their thorns.
Uncanny—nothing in nature
so rigid,
nothing more harmful
than her rare affection.
v.
August: honeymoon at Niagara,
water shut off—
bad luck.
Two bodies,
a man’s and a woman’s
found face-
down in the mud
at the bottom of the gorge.
Neglected
on the cliffs above,
Tesla’s alternating current station,
powerless
in its pure machinery,
honeyed, lunar magnets
waiting in their sockets
for the current to resume.
Enough about friction:
this is about two bodies
at the end of America,
repelling each other
under the polar rush of water,
generating their own distance
over time. Is it history
or home
that hurts us more?
Did she look into the gorge
as into his face
when she said Yes—
to see the downpour,
even when it was damned?
vi.
Nothing in me wasted,
a use for grief, even.
I wore it on my left hand.
I was married to it.
I planted myself
in the dirt:
alphabets grew up
from the bones of my feet.
I drowned my heart
in the lake.
Black hole, such vanity—
navigating the ear canals
like so many gondoliers
trolling the watery streets
looking for someone
to sing to. Beautiful
fisherman who fished
my heart out of its lake—
I did not die. I revived.
I wore her face on my fingers
when I dug up my joy
up from the ground, singing:
Oh wooden coffin, woman’s body,
boulder at home
in its stone skin.
vii.
Yes, then, to all of it: to the drowned
sea urchins, porcupines spined,
and the black-brain
coral that sleeps
on the ocean’s floor,
ruinously blue. Yes
to the vultures that roost
above the waterfall,
that don’t
surrender their nests
at our dissolution,
and to the bones that do.
To remember is to open
one door
after another
all along
the white corridor
to say Yes when asked,
Are you anything?
Did she love you?
To go forward
is to surrender
the necklace of tears she gave me—
this failed body
with my name on it.