Oestara

The first day of spring. I can tell because I’m writing a poem and it occurs to me to oil the table later. And also because my husband and I have been spending a lot of money lately— for instance, on sex toys and on going out to dinner, which we have not been allowed to do for about a year. At age thirty, I am getting my teeth fixed. Life feels frivolous: One day we worry about buying a coffee, the next we suggest we should think about buying a new car though we know the most important thing is to walk in the ravine. Where the creek swells with money in the spring. All the money we needed three months ago, that was frozen like a fish in a block of ice, or equally like a credit card in a cottage cheese container of ice. Now all this money is flooding the household slush fund. There is a great quantity of mud.  Every spring we buy new shoes and wade out bravely into it. Who buys new shoes to preserve them? My husband has a new girlfriend and I will doubtless soon start sleeping with an old friend (until recently another frozen fish). This influx of money brings an influx of mud and shoes and sex. The spring is always too late and always too much. 

 

I resent poetry

I resent poetry that uses words like ‘syzygy’. Words like that are an unholy mystery, a fancy box with cheap chocolate inside, a circle cutting off a straight line. The worst  thing a poet can do, in my opinion, is reference a Greek myth. We are not green  eighteen year-olds. A poem is not a 100-level quiz. As if the Greeks had a monopoly on  tragedy. I hate found poetry. I hate the poetry of Margaret Atwood, except that one  poem about her child playing blocks, which someone, my undergrad professor of all  people, sent me after my miscarriage. Telling me the poetry of Margaret Atwood had  also happened to her. ‘Abyssalpelagic’ is another cursed word. Also from the Greek.  Also performative. A word that does what it says. No matter how good of a poet you  are, it takes you out of your depth. The game of monopoly is an appropriate subject for  a poem. Playing blocks is an appropriate subject for a poem. Squirrels are good, like that White Stripes song. I’ve never been more enchanted by poetry than when Jack  White said he was going to Wichita, far from this opera forever more. Jack White has  no time for ‘phosphenes’, which just means pressing on your own eyeballs when you  should be out looking for the light, or ‘concatenate’, which just means a word after a  word after a word is power. Holding it together is power. In my opinion, words like that are weak links. Holding it together is what women do, and it is an argument sometimes  used against them as poets. Look at that woman, gadding about, dragging that chain,  writing this poem. The difficulty of doing up your own gold clasp in the back is an appropriate subject for poetry. I hate poems that go into alliterative raptures, like this brisk breaking  of my own set of rules. I said I didn’t want to have a kid, but then decided I would.  Not on your life, the universe came back at me. Who do you think you are, Niobe?

 

Darling, I have removed myself to a timeless bed or bath,
to avoid a man
to miss an opportunity 
to skip a party
to interrupt the thing I would say.

My body simply crumples in place
(rather than walk across this particular stage);

it folds like an ankle. 

There is a decision I must reverse,
a call I must make. 
It seems this is another way to make money the sacred body 
will not contemplate—

so I have put myself to bed.
I have given in. 
The swollen throat, the running nose, the aching limbs,
I have given in.

My appointments for the rest of the week
are become impossible. 

My sacred body is balking like a dog,
before a nasty rotten bridge,

(and I am shivering under two blankets, fully immersed);

let’s just say you have whipped on to the ice
an honest horse.

 

We had a photoshoot last night, and this morning I am exporting a hundred photos of Susan from CR2 to JPEG one at a time.

I have been sitting here for hours. My ass hurts. Every time I touch the mouse,  time stops while a little rainbow wheel spins.

I tell Susan, I will never shoot raw again. Susan pouts. Don't I like the way she looks? Yes.

I touch the mouse. The wheel spins, time drains into the abyss,  but I turn to touch her thigh and gaze a long time into her real live, lovely face.

 

We set out in the van around lunchtime and set up camp at Moose Lake, where an apocalyptic atmosphere prevails.

The trees left standing here are either rust-brown or dragging with a poisonous-looking, donut-shaped fungus.

Ranger is fiercely at work with his teeth, ripping up roots the sandy ground cannot hold.

Susan, would you believe  I forgot to bring a corkscrew? The brawny man at the next campsite

over, who cheerfully offered to uncork my bottle with his bare hands, is primely placed 

(in his tank top) to stand in  for the humanity with which we,  as a species, are losing touch. 

I have given him a glass of wine. Rather than buy firewood I have collected a heap of branches 

wrenched from their toppled carcasses; and yet (despite how dry they are), I somehow  doubt they will burn. 

 

wife eating a pear out in the open

 

Nevermind, it’s a communal pear, and both of them hang on the hinge of my jaw. Juice runs down my arm to the mouth of the  dog. The first bite was mine, and my last, then my husband swooped in like a white gull.

 

I am reckless. I have been scraping about. I have shone a cheap light, dipped a wire to test the oil, sucked up the salt,  gone to bed to wait.

I am curious  I have inserted a maple key. I have allowed a stick insect  to crawl up inside. It frisks its hands together,  chattering, cleaning. It is on my side.

It draws the line. It divides me from my mother, the others bleeding together, feeling each other, tricking each other into carrying children, wanting the sister, her fresh loaf, her claim. You say it is mine—please take it away.

Am I confusing?  I have been cultivating. I am dry it is a front lawn                                                                           

I have been watering. I am sheltering no one, entangling no one,  cropping the clover,  killing the bees, advertising real estate grief,  flaunting insanity, groomed as a man in the military—

or a field to plow under, scrubby as an ashtray, or a crop you torch in front of the enemy. I give you nothing; you may take anything.

Because I am betrayed. I cannot perform.  I bandaged my waist  like a Dutch Elm, I published my disease, I have laid my trap. And yet here my hips open like a five o’clock farm gate, like french doors  to the garden— spreading like antlers, gripped like a steering wheel,  those wide,  child-bearing hips I open as often as you will.