coils of your bowels like smoke, your hearts

opening like jaws, drops from your glands

clinging to my walls like pearls in the night.

You think I left—I was the child

who got away, thousands of miles,

but not a day goes past that I am not

turning someone into you.

Never having had you, I cannot let you go, I

turn now, in the fear of this moment,

into your soft stained paw

resting on her breast, into your breast trying to

creep away from under his palm—

your gooseflesh like the shells of a thousand tiny snails,

your palm like a streambed gone dry in summer.

The Victims

When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it and

took it, in silence, all those years and then

kicked you out, suddenly, and her

kids loved it. Then you were fired, and we

grinned inside, the way people grinned when

Nixon’s helicopter lifted off the South

Lawn for the last time. We were tickled

to think of your office taken away,

your secretaries taken away,

your lunches with three double bourbons,

your pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take your

suits back, too, those dark

carcasses hung in your closet, and the black

noses of your shoes with their large pores?

She had taught us to take it, to hate you and take it

until we pricked with her for your

annihilation, Father. Now I

pass the bums in doorways, the white

slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in their

suits of compressed silt, the stained

flippers of their hands, the underwater

fire of their eyes, ships gone down with the

lanterns lit, and I wonder who took it and

took it from them in silence until they had

given it all away and had nothing

left but this.

The Forms

I always had the feeling my mother would

die for us, jump into a fire

to pull us out, her hair burning like

a halo, jump into water, her white

body going down and turning slowly,

the astronaut whose hose is cut

falling
       into
             blackness. She would have

covered us with her body, thrust her

breasts between our chests and the knife,

slipped us into her coat pocket

outside the showers. In disaster, an animal

mother, she would have died for us,

but in life as it was

she had to put herself

first.

She had to do whatever he

told her to do to the children, she had to

protect herself. In war, she would have

died for us, I tell you she would,

and I know: I am a student of war,

of gas ovens, smothering, knives,

drowning, burning, all the forms

in which I have experienced her love.

The Departure

(to my father)

Did you weep like the Shah when you left? Did you forget

the way you had had me tied to a chair, as

he forgot the ones strapped to the grille