|
Remembering Kristeva, Afterwards We come to language in mourning, eyes dark with lust, our tongues thick with the knowledge of the breast. Who would not stand on the other side of the word and weep for the strange Braille of the mother’s flesh? Who would not wish to cross again the cavernous in-between and speak through skin, that thinnest of fortresses? If I had only refused at first to speak, curled mute and new in the carnal hush before! If I had resisted the perfect lure of the word. Now there is only a trace in the night, a shadow of memory, my skin humming the truth of your skin - lost. I sing – though I sing until the words scratch the back of my throat, I cannot find the truth of your skin on mine. I would swim like an infant in the deep of your eyes, I would relinquish this useless dialect. I would give every letter to know and be known. |
Psychoanalytic I close my eyes, yearning to learn the curves of your body blind, to map by touch alone your angular planes. Imagine, coiled close against the young smooth and pink of me, silver filaments of your chest hair. You could be my father, you say, you are old enough to be my father. This bothers you. At the place of our joining, the place where you fill me like newly-turned earth in a grave, I burst into a flowering of desire. Suddenly I realize I was born with this need, a carnivore with a fully developed taste for the raw, you need never be strange to me again. And who will I be, how will I know myself with you inside me? How will I know myself without you there? |
The Promise As if I could, zygotic, swim again in mother-blood, warm baptismal waters of the womb, brush once more against the nascent state. To suckle the breast and still remember lips on my own nipples, the slow velvet lick of a lover’s tongue. Erotic, the gentle elastic snap of tendon from bone, the satisfactory unraveling. Oh, to collapse again to a single cell! To cleave to uterine tissue, thin and pink. Not to need to die to live again. Rebirth, you vowed, and I broke myself like waves against your law before I heard the rest: Rebirth, you sighed, but first, but first - death. I was born confessing, sin on my tongue, its viscous black like bile in the back of my throat. From the start, I spoke fluent language of the fall. Rebirth. Who would not desire life anew, a folding back of the self to the fertile seed? Who, despite the agony of collapse? |
The Persistence of Memory after Dali Salvador Dali brought me to a screaming boil, melted me down like gold, then poured out my simmering skin on a block of dry ice. It struck me as strange – isn’t Dali dead? and did he really look exactly like my father? I was in the hayloft of my parents’ barn - I forgot that part - and somehow I wasn’t flat anymore. I kept falling into holes beneath the hay, hearing my father’s voice: That hayloft isn’t safe. I clung to rotting wood until my fingers turned numb, legs churning air. My sister was there. The neighbor boy stood, unbuckling his belt. I heard her calling my name and calling my name, and when she finally went silent, I fell. |