The Mirror

I reflect on this desperate note while waiting in the children's hospital. The desperate cry my son left cold as ice in his closed eyes after poison. Benches of blood. This is a wooden tragedy. Joyce & I walked home under the huge night thru a grand sweep and around midnight I scribble a letter to my sister, who is dying five minutes at a time:             You are the flower of confusion             coming up in the morning             of my love and             going tightly shut in the afternoon of             anger. Anger & bitterness.                                          I look forward to your resurrection....

Deaths & betrayals, a friend having her breasts cut off, a friend having his heart re-wired, a husband lying, a lover never writing, & all this in the middle of May. I walk out in the green wind of Spring. The air whistles at my calves like silk stockings— my grandmother's silk stockings kept in a drawer— & whispering songs of the twenties. My breasts ache, my heart skips over cracks, my womb pulls earthward with its heavy blood. I seem to be attached to those I love by chains of flesh. Perhaps the mind lacks empathy enough; the body has to bleed as well.                         ☙ I can't imagine them cutting you apart— I with my endless dreams of torture, who lay awake nights with my eyelids screaming all childhood long. I never saw your breasts yet I can't imagine you without them. All week I have been fondling my nipples, hal...

From the first it had been like a Ballad. It had the beat inevitable. It had the blood. A wildness cut up, and tied in little bunches, Like the four-line stanzas of the ballads she had never quite Understood - the ballads they had set her to, in school. Herself: the milk-white maid, the "maid mild" Of the ballad. Pursued By the Dark Villain. Rescued by the Fine Prince. The Happiness-Ever-After. That was worth anything. It was good to be a "maid mild." That made the breath go fast. Her bacon burned. She Hastened to hide it in the step-on can, and Drew more strips from the meat case. The eggs and sour-milk biscuits Did well. She set out a jar Of her new quince preserve. ...But there was something about the matter of the Dark Villain. He should have been older, perhaps. The hacking down of a villain was more fun to think about When his menace possessed undisputed breath, undisputed height, And a harsh kind of vice And best of all, when his hist...