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The terrible tears have all been wept
and only a few dark brown cello notes
hang in the afternoon air,
where, once,
night’s sullen heart reverberated.
You were always an empty street,
lit with pale yellow lamps,
never a fellow traveler.
I asked you to take my hand
and walk me home
and you answered with bones
and the silence of bones,
the carcass of autumn,
already stiffening into winter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Holes,
holes in everything, even bones,
even minds become soiled doilies,
and the flightless wings
of blighted memory
are blood-rusted stubs,
not bridal lace.

Long ago, I must have been
a sorrowful, leathery ape of a child,
clambering in the moss-grown ruins
of my mother’s madness.

On the last day that I had a mind,
I remembered walking
between hot, copper columns of sunlight,
meeting my father’s bones
and my brother’s ashes
and answering their questions
about my charred, failed life.

On the last day that I had a body,
a crone with black smoke wings
instead of arms
left a pearl-colored child,
who was as lovely, silent and stupid as a fish,
in a bundle on my front porch.
I knelt and cradled her
against my stammering heart,
and I rocked the death baby
rocked the death baby.

 

I want some storm before the calm,
dancing, wind-battered on top of an avalanche,
embraced by thunder
every time lightening unzips the darkness.
My house was my body
and it was filled with children.

Now the rooms are washed shapeless
by rain and failure.
As ashes fall and water rises,
all of the dolls are broken or lost,
all of the babies are small and smaller bones.

Shame is never a single voice,
but a shrouded chorus of small, pale faces,
whispering to me from inside a smeared mirror:
“What you called healing, called mother-wisdom
was dancing with your own reflection.
What you called love, was pride.”

Time is not smooth and even everywhere;
there are places where it thickens and slows.
I will lie down there, in that tale,
in that forest,
as tiny cold hands bloom
from the pestilent soil around me.
I will endure the agony
of their terrible forgiveness.
Even when they are pressed into my mouth,
I will not swallow the healing leaves of death
or protect my face with earth
when stars pick at my eyes
with their accusing bone fingers
from a billion miles away.

This piece has three “rooms”, each expressing a different possible outcome for the tale. In the “Hunter and the Wolf”, viewers may place an iPhone inside the tv set, click on a YouTube video and see what the Hunter and Wolf are watching.

Red Riding Hood and the Wolf

Once I saw what was coming,
why did I do nothing to stop it,
to save my daughter?
Her grass stained cape, her wine breath
should have been evidence enough.
Why did I tell myself
that the cake I saw, crushed beside the path,
belonged to a careless woodcutter’s lunch?
Her lies were so young
and so clumsy:
“Grandma is getting worse,
She won’t remember my visits
five minutes after I leave.”
Now my only daughter is truly gone.
Fled to the wolf’s lair?
To a distant village?
All night the forest branches creak
and accuse outside the window
of my cottage.
Why did I never tell her
that my own hood
was moss colored velvet,
that her father
was a flame-red fox?

Grandma and the Hunter

Alarmed by the animal sounds from inside,
Red Riding Hood and her Wolf
burst into my cottage.
The Hunter and I laughed
at the little O’s
made by their mouths and eyes.
My granddaughter slammed the door,
but no matter.
I could never have explained to her
how I have waited a lifetime
to be caught
by the warm, certain hands
of this grizzled Hunter.
Run and then lie down
in the wild, cold woods
in the snow dazzled noon
with your Wolf, my dear girl.
I will stay here,
bedded with my Hunter,
trapped in breathless ecstasy,
freed.

The Wolf and the Hunter (In this one, viewers may place an iPhone inside the tv set, click on a YouTube video and see what the Hunter and Wolf are watching.)

Now that Grandma
is a warm lump in my belly,
now that the red hood
is a bright flame
flickering, fleeing
into the forest,
come to me.
I will praise your hunter’s body,
only slightly less furred
than my own.
We are both forest creatures.
We are not frightened
of one another’s teeth,
different and the same,
of one another’s sharp cries,
of our shared wildness

.   

 

Once upon a time, there was a mother whose heart had grown on the outside of her body. Every little breeze of her children’s joy made it tremble and their smallest woes caused it to twist and thud with pain.
All day long her arms were filled with children, like sweet bouquets. She built them a house entirely out of flowers and every single morning, she made cake.
Many years of mornings and small birds passed. At last, she had only the memory of children’s voices, like bright scattered candies, and finally, enormous, mindless Death came and ate her up.
Her children waved goodbye as the flower house fell down, but most of them remembered it for quite a long time.

Into how many fragments
can a heart be broken
before it is ground
utterly into dust?
What manner of tender
vernal mist
caresses the valleys
one by one,
heals dust into mud
and shapes earth
into summer?
How does the blunt
ordinary thirst of hands,
mouth,
bodies,
invoke a supple rivulet
that, ripening, ascends,
transforms
into the green fire,
grace
and plentitude of trees?

 

 

Once, long ago, in a faraway land
there lived a princess
who was as old and dry
as a pile of rags.
She lived in a tower of rust, where all she had to eat
were weeds and sour cheese ,
and gnarled gnomes stabbed into her
with rough-barked thumbs.
One night, as the brass gong of the moon
sounded its single note, over and over,
she climbed the highest, most decayed turret
of her loneliness
and leapt.
Rags snapped,
flapped,
and became wings.
Her fall became flight
and she flew far away.
Now she lives in a mossy forest
and is quite young again,
pink as a sunset
and happy.
As happy, at least, as one can be
without being a child or an animal,
content as the falling amber and umber leaves,
letting go.

 

 

“The Madwoman’s Granddaughter– History of the Drowned Cities: the Granddaughter Speaks” (Page One)

We are all survivors of a personal Atlantis, all of us risen from the sunken continent of childhood. Even yet, I find myself inundated by remembrance, seduced by the drowned sound of bells still tolling from beneath the waves. Sometimes I return in dreams, the lifeless body of a child melting out of my arms as my face breaks the surface and I waken. The South is another sort of dream, suggestive and persistent, a country composed equally of the survivors of dreams and the drowned.  After many years of terror and self discipline, I allow myself to live just at the edge, in the hills overlooking the turquoise waters of art, memory and madness.

 

 

 

When I am dead
you may tell the story
of how, in a land not far away,
a woman’s torment became rage
and her rage grew flesh, drew breath,
and in the night
crept down a witching tree
in many fox bodies,
not sisters
but a single consciousness.
Scores of sharp teeth
ripped open silken cocoons
and under a raw, gnawed
autumn moon,
she smiled like broken glass,
admiring all of her knife-long fingers
delicate
red
dripping.

 

Exhausted by houses
and their contents,
her body at last broke free,
left doors splintered outward,
left curtains slapping
in the unexpected breeze.
From high above
the grasping maples,
she began to see how
the earth curved,
how it sheltered
the little nursling moon
against its arched hip,
how stars stabbed
or oozed, so much farther apart
than she had ever imagined.
For a little while longer
she would recall the exact, humid weight
of a child
against her shoulder,
then, the fever of exploding nebulae
burned away the memory
of any human face.