I think I'm going to read another one of my insect animal
S-and-M stories.
[LAUGHS] This is called, "Winning."
And it's dedicated someone I went to graduate school with,
who told me this part of the story, which I then
created the poem around her.
"It's the temper of the razor as it skirts her ankle bone.
The amber globes of turtle oil.
She lies deep on a green chaise, cotton between her toes,
one leg raised, and flames each nail.
More than one man has called her fingers perfect--
the moon's gibbous.
In the dressing room, the lingerie with hoya
vining up the belly, the celery-colored cashmere dress,
and spiked heels.
Tonight, she'll blur like a gouache and tip forward.
As a young girl, Saturday nights,
while her parents fought among the steak knives,
she sat on the edge of the bath, soaping up.
As their voices rose from the kitchen,
she hummed and dipped each limb in water,
until she'd shaved even the blonde thistles
along her knuckles.
Afterwards, there were cool drinks.
So much smoothness.
Sometimes, she forgets what she wants.
Once the boa wrapped about her as she watched the soap opera.
It was her brother's.
He told her, it ate a young calf each month alive.
She was nine.
No bigger than a calf.
And each time she stood, its skin tensed about her waist.
The unnerving temperature.
She waited all afternoon for her brother
to come home and untangle the snake.
Smooth, she thought.
Escape.
And she smiled, and kept stroking its throat."
[AUDIO CUTS OUT THEN RESUMES]
A bowl of red berries, he'd burl, and stretch,
and claw about my hips.
One night, as the cat and I watched the moon eclipse,
amid the scuttling of bear and mice,
there was a cry from the forest.
Not seductive, but pained and wailing, like a siren.
The next day, the cat was gone.
I'd heard that even blackbirds broke veins in their throats
singing love songs.
I stood by my window practicing, trying to shape the feline song
to call him back.
My daughter was no different than a cat,
tapping the window glass over my bed, crying at night
till I rocked her frail ribs against mine.
Her hands on my breast, dark curls
sweated against her forehead.
Tell me about the princess, she said.
The way she slept in a blue dress, waiting.
It was a month of heat storms, lightning
scratched like Sanskrit across the valley.
A boy came riding our footpath.
He wore black jeans, a sliver of green malachite at his neck.
The breathless afternoon, the bees
laid out on the red eyes of gaillardia.
Before she left, my daughter cut off her long hair
and bleached it yellow.
There were years when I too turned from my mother's
cool white arms.
First, the pale boy-- scarred and silent.
Then my husband.
We cleaned the ditches together in spring,
raking out silt and dead branches.
He played a silver harmonica.
A ring boned pony was what I had when we ran away.
A field of salsify and a black skillet.
Stretched out on the porch this noon, resting my swollen legs,
I'm tired of canning tomatoes-- the house thick with red steam
and basil, the bite of salt and vinegar,
cucumbers floating like green bathers in brine.
All that flesh I've tended gone to pulp.
All that mismatched tenderness.
One weed knows another.
And each animal has its own cry.
And when it's right, it's easy.
Easy as my husband behind me now,
holding open the black screen door.
He's drinking tea with honey and a halo of gnats
screams about his face.
Let's sneak down to the basement, he says,
where it's cool and dark.
He cracks a bead of ice in his teeth, and offers half to me."