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What once was meant to be a statement— a dripping dagger held in the fist of a shuddering heart—is now just a bruise on a bony old shoulder, the spot where vanity once punched him hard and the ache lingered on. He looks like someone you had to reckon with, strong as a stallion, fast and ornery, but on this chilly morning, as he walks between the tables at a yard sale with the sleeves of his tight blackT-shirt rolled up to show us who he was, he is only another old man, picking up broken tools and putting them back, his heart gone soft and blue with stories.
“I hate what I come from,” says my cousin Shoshana, 22, jawing per always, feather earrings tangling in her light brown hair. Shoshana hangs on to Kinesha, her kid, to stop her running off. Our cousin Deb’s wedding just got out; we’re standing at the bottom of the wedding hall steps. “White people don’t have culture, except what they stole from our African brothers.” Shoshana’s wearing black, per always, me too, her in leather, me in acetate-velour. “Weddings, U-G-H.” Shoshana spells out ugh like it’s spelled in books. “I hope yours was cooler than this.” I nod. I always nod at Shoshana, whatever she says. Shoshana checks, rechecks her watch, watching for her boyfriend. I’m waiting for my husband too. I’ve been a pain in the ass to him all morning. Shoshana sips cheap California champagne to hide her upset feelings. Kinesha breaks loose, veers close to the street and parked cars and traffic, thrashes her lace anklets and buckle shoes into a crowd of part-white pigeons.
“In London I only hung out with Jamaicans,” Shoshana says. “People gave me looks on the bus. Ouch.” She detangles an earring. “Once I ripped an earlobe on these. Anyway, I want you to meet my boyfriend. He’s cool, he’s sticking by me. He says he knew he could when I wouldn’t dime him out after they caught me with his pot in the Kingston airport. Kinesha’s his. He’s the only guy I’ve loved since, you know, Ken?” Ken’s the one who died beside her of an overdose in the Motel 6 in Ohio the time she was 16 and stole her dad’s Beamer to run away. “You heard?” Of course I did, in this family. “Kinesha’s Kinesha to remember him,” she says. “I still miss him.” I nod. I poke Kinesha’s belly, her nose. “U-G-H,” says Kinesha, annoyed. I’m bad with kids. “I’m teaching her to assert herself,” Shoshana says. Her wrist-chains jangle. I twist my wedding ring. An organ somewhere plays “Ode to Joy.”
Here comes the third bad cousin, Christina, scruff-haired in the pale-pink prom dress the bride her sister made her wear. $90,000 per year doing something with websites and she can’t even keep her hair in order. “Isn’t it awful?” Christina says, “What do I look like, Gwyneth Paltrow? You guys look swell.” She’s good with kids: Kinesha slams herself for a hug into Christina’s legs. Christina and Kinesha kiss. She says “Did you like my PowerPoint presentation on the bride’s life? Did you think it was funny? Go play with the pigeons.” She puts Kinesha down. “Deb wanted a poem, but don’t you hate poems? Was it wrong of me to start with an Eminem quote?” Kinesha shouts, staggers, stamps at the pigeons; jaded, they hardly move, only jump-start halfhearted when Kinesha brandishes her one-armed naked Barbie above her head, then turns Barbie into a gun, shoots at the pigeons. “I feel like we should be sneaking around back with cigarettes like we used to, remember?” says Christina. “Too bad we don’t smoke anymore.”
Shoshana takes out her Newports, lights up. I’m remembering we never much liked each other, only hung together at family gatherings because we were supposed to be the bad ones. I hate what I come from. I say “My father just told me again my poems are ‘too full of disgusting sex.’ He said ‘Why don’t you write more like Derek Walcott?’ I’m sick of him throwing deep-thinking genius men up at me.” Christina rolls her eyes, shakes her head, fudges hair tendrils back into her frizzy twisted updo, vibrates her lips, blows air out. “Can you tell I’m drunk already?” she asks. I nod. She shrugs. “Well, why not, Deb didn’t invite single guys for me like I asked her. Selfish as always.”
Shoshana checks her watch. “I’m gonna kill him.” I wish I wanted to kill my husband. Right now, I hate everything, everybody, and don’t have a friend in the world except my husband. It’s true he dislikes me more and more these days but at least he likes my poems and hates Derek Walcott. Kinesha sprays Barbie bullets at everything, Barbie’s head as bald as her elided crotch. “I didn’t buy her that racist, sexist doll,” says Shoshana. Christina and I nod. “She found my old one. I pulled all her hair out when I was 14 and shaved my head the first time.” Kinesha moves away from the settling pigeons, turns her Barbie gun on us, shoots. Rat-a-tat-tat. “Ugh, you got me,” we say, and “BANG!” I say. We turn our hands into guns, three bad cousins, Mother, Bridesmaid, Wife-and-Daughter, for all our different reasons, shooting the child.
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
It's that vague feeling of panic That sweeps over you Stepping out of the #7 train At dusk, thinking, This isn't me Crossing a platform with the other Commuters in the sad half-light Of evening, that must be
Someone else with a newspaper Rolled tightly under his arm Crossing the stiff, iron tracks Behind the train, thinking, This Can't be me stepping over the tracks With the other commuters, slowly crossing The parking lot at the deepest Moment of the day, wishing
That I was someone else, wishing I was anyone else but a man Looking out at himself as if From a great distance, through water, Turning the key in his car, starting His car and swinging it out of the lot,
Watching himself grinding uphill In a slow fog, climbing past the other Cars parked on the side of the road, The cars which seem terribly empty And strange, and suddenly thinking With a new wave of nausea This isn't me sitting in this car Feeling as if I were about to drown
In the blue air, that must be Someone else driving home to his Wife and children on an ordinary day Which ends, like other days, With a man buckled into a steel box, Steering himself home and trying Not to panic
In the last moments of nightfall When the trees and the red-brick houses Seem to float undergreen water, And the streets fill up with sea lights.
In the evening we came back Into our yellow room, For a moment taken aback To find the light left on, Falling on silent flowers, Table, book, empty chair While we had gone elsewhere, Had been away for hours.
When we came home together We found the inside weather. All of our love unended The quiet light demanded, And we gave, in a look At yellow walls and open book. The deepest world we share And do not talk about But have to have, was there, And by that light found out.
notice the convulsed orange inch of moon perching on this silver minute of evening.
We'll choose the way to the forest - no offense to you, white town whose spires softly dare. Will take the houseless wisping rune of road lazily carved on sharpening air.
Fields lying miraculous in violent silence
fill with microscopic whithering . . . (that's the Black People, chérie, who live under stones.) Don't be afraid
and we will pass the simple ugliness of exact tombs, where a large road crosses and all the people are minutely dead.
More like a vault -- you pull the handle out and on the shelves: not a lot, and what there is (a boiled potato in a bag, a chicken carcass under foil) looking dispirited, drained, mugged. This is not a place to go in hope or hunger. But, just to the right of the middle of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red, heart red, sexual red, wet neon red, shining red in their liquid, exotic, aloof, slumming in such company: a jar of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters full, fiery globes, like strippers at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino, the only foreign word I knew. Not once did I see these cherries employed: not in a drink, nor on top of a glob of ice cream, or just pop one in your mouth. Not once. The same jar there through an entire childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat, pocked peas and, see above, boiled potatoes. Maybe they came over from the old country, family heirlooms, or were status symbols bought with a piece of the first paycheck from a sweatshop, which beat the pig farm in Bohemia, handed down from my grandparents to my parents to be someday mine, then my child's? They were beautiful and, if I never ate one, it was because I knew it might be missed or because I knew it would not be replaced and because you do not eat that which rips your heart with joy.
When I see a couple of kids And guess he's fucking her and she's Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives - Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And thought, That'll be the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark About hell and that, or having to hide What you think of the priest. He And his lot will all go down the long slide Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
