it was made of dead material which had been

living, once, still marked with the free

swim of its grain. And my relationship

with it was something new in my life,

I’d never been held down, and bound

to a thing, made equal with it. All I would have

had to do was say “I’m sorry

I poured the India ink on your bed.”

We didn’t have the word no-brainer, which has

rain in it, and bra, and a shriek—

aiee—but the being-tied-up was nothing

compared to the pain which she gave me with

a menstrual regularity

in that room. When my younger brother would peek in,

to see me bent to an object’s angles,

the shame of it was nothing—without

physical pain, everything

was nothing. And I had not read

A Child’s Book of Martyrs for nothing—

martyrs which had art and tears

in it. O.K., it warped me, it scared me, it

obsessed me—well what can you do. Some kids

have a hobby-horse, some a thing

which has been tied to them.

Maybe it’s time to put my prop

to sleep, to bury it, its shape

of someone who died in a fire, and plant

a bush above it, whose rose-roots can find it as it

rots, and lets my chair leaf out

again, green bud and blossom.

Grandmother, with Parakeet

In airport waiting rooms, in Eureka,

Portland, Anchorage, Seattle, members of her

court appear to me—grim

prom attendants, old women

with mouths downturned like a rainbow, their hair

iron gray, thick, fixed in

small breaking combers, battleship

curls like works of art—I recognize

the hand of my grandmother’s 1940s

Northwest hairdresser, school of arrested

surf. Out of her footbridge of a mouth

came a voice with darks and lights and liquidy

creaks, and underwater hinges, and bright brown

lollopings over creek stones

which shone. I did not know the words

whiskey voice, I knew she made jokes—

I guess they were actually sour remarks!—

in that voice. And she called me Dearie, it was

just what she and her covey would call

a child, but I took it as a personal endearment,

a sign of preference. My Gram was mine, she

made crabby and grumpy look good,

and she gave me a bird, like a Bible aviary,

whom I taught to say, in an amber chuckle, I love Shary.

Paper Doll Ballad, for Fats

I liked cutting out paper clothes, I

liked getting the tabs right—

girls bony as coat-hangers, the mother’s

right to half-bare the child, the lower

the power half. How sorely I wanted to be

sane. What a life we are given! Sudden,

and cold, with blood on it. Ferns

and grasses, reptiles, rodents, then there we

were, with our pacifiers, in our

infant seats. What they’d had when me mum was a

dote was a laudanum-soaked rag.

But I had smuggled in my thumb,

and they did not paint it with iodine

until I was 9. And those funny feelings,

when I sucked it—if she hadn’t, early on,