by Fanny Howe
So the refilling is adding a sting to the salt.
Living naked
still leaves you covered
by a surface of wood, feathers, fur or skin.
Bare skin, blue skin: a muff of lambskin
over the ears where the thief can get in.
It’s lucky the mind freezes before the heart.
Back there is the string of mountains your uncle painted
and you lost. Out there is the clotted cream
on a raspberry tart that he couldn’t finish.
There is the goose and the blackbird, the brindled donkey
and the trap. They stand on the thin black thread of your lineage.
Your scissors are split, your fiddle is cracked, its strings are thin
and your mouth is dry, your clothes American.
No more rush of notes as if a window is open inside.
Only if you are insane or asleep
and the gods and animals
pound their way in
on a divine night wind.
Second Childhood
I have a fairy rosary called Silver who answers questions when I dangle her in the sun at the window.
So I’ve asked her if I have a big ego and she swings from side to side to say no.
We have other children for friends.
We don’t understand why we are here in the world with horrible grown-ups or what the lessons are that we’re supposed to learn.
It’s not helpful for us to hear ourselves described in religious, geriatric or psychological terms, because we don’t remember what they mean.
One cruel female said, “Don’t laugh so much. You’re not a child.”
My cheeks burned and my eyes grew hot.
I decided to stop becoming an adult. That day I chose to blur facts, fail at tests, and slouch under a hood.
School was my first testing ground. I misunderstood lessons, assignments, meanings of poems and stories, and misinterpreted the gestures of characters in novels. I was awestruck by geology but mixed up the ages of rocks. I stared and giggled, and refused to take orders and was punished.
Throughout my life I have remained vague and have accepted the humiliation it brought, almost as if stupefaction were a gift. I willfully repeat my mistakes over and over and never learn from experience.
Every day has been a threat to this attitude so I avoid obligations.
For example, last night I dreamed I was on an airplane that was open to the sky and a storm was coming from a hive of stars, and I wanted to sit beside my daughter to watch the wind as we strapped ourselves tight to the invisible seats and stayed awake in the air.
If we had been grown-ups, we wouldn’t have been able to see the stars or the storm. We would have perished.
So my commitment to childhood has once again been affirmed.
Read the signs, not the authorities.
You might think I am just old but I have finally decided to make the decision to never grow up, and remain under my hood.
We are like tiny egos inside a great mountain of air.
Pressed upon by the weight of ether, we can barely breathe.
One ego is like a spider clutched to a web of its own making.
It turns to enamel and hardens on fulfillment.
Many egos fill up the whole body, every part to the tiniest hair.
Some egos are like fingernails that have been stifled by brittle paint.
All egos have something impersonal about them. They live deep inside like viruses and unlike gods who play in outer air.
But this ego covered my face with spider-dust as I lay in my bassinet.
Today I keep seeing gauze of a crystal kind, another kind of web of a type that doesn’t harden but swings and shimmers.
It’s the web-hood of a lost spirit.
At birth a baby failure is unconscious of the shadow that covers her face: it’s from the success leaning over her crèche smudging out the color in her cheeks.
The failure is born to measure the shadow of success. This is the failure’s mission.
The secret hood around her face indicates her vocation.
The success arrives in triumph, and is instantly obsolescent, while the failures keep trying, failing and reproducing until another success is born. It could be centuries from their lifetime.
It’s NOT ironical but logical that the failure is the one who recognizes success and identifies its potential in her enemies.
She it is who keeps their egos alive with her tears.
She is their harshest critic, she who can separate the fraud from the living, the cold from the lukewarm.
She is still a failure, a tiny ego who can’t quite rise to the occasion of being. She is driven by longing.
And she has crazy rules: “If your whole body can’t breathe the air, your prayers are incomplete. No nail polish!”
I think the gods and goddesses were the last good grown-ups on earth. Once I saw them walking to a party along a beach and I could make out their shadows like a line of pines in an ocean breeze. They were laughing and calling to each other. Still they were always aware of their mortal children’s prayers and answered them, sometimes in the form of mist, sometimes with needles of sunlight.
The gods existed outside the ego-world though they were certainly jealous and angry. Now some of them are pots and pans and wax and marbles, balls and kettles, rope and puddles. They emit a crackling sound when lightning hits the ground, and give people shingles. Other gods have chosen to break out to heaven where they blend into pastel and ride comets once a year. Sometimes it’s hard to walk with so many gods bouncing around so I use a broom, rosary or cane to wave them away.
Progress
I have never arrived
into a new life yet.
Have you?
Do you find the squeak
of boots on snow
excruciating?
Have you heard people
say, It wasn’t me,
when they accomplished
a great feat?
I have, often.
But rarely.
Possibility
is one of the elements.
It keeps things going.
The ferry
with its ratty engine
and exactitude at chugging
into blocks and chains.
Returning as ever
to mother’s house
under a salty rain.
Slave up, slave down.
I want to leave this place
a postulant.
The gas stove is leaking
and the door of the refrigerator
stained with rust.
The mugs are ugly
and there are only two forks.
The walls are black
and soft, the bed a balloon
of night-clothing.
The stairwell sloped
to a dragger’s pace.
There are big windows
with blind-slats dusty
and gray. Street life
goes all night and at dawn
freedmen shout and
laugh outside the kitchen.
Where does life begin?
In the lamb or in its threads?
If a man is numb
beat him.
If mute, shout
Say my name!
If he’s still wearing
that coat, scream
Mercy, mercy!
and stroke it.
We drop the shadows where they are then
return to them
when the light has grown heavy.
You’ll take your time lugging the weight into our room
or stand over there in the shade.
We’ve never been too sure that we exist as the earth does.
We’re most at home in water
that soaks up the letters in our brains.
It could be we’ve been dry too long.
A spirit is a mess when excess spoils it.
>
I see them through the slats
and crack of the open window.
A cold rain. Leaves flipped
and palsied.
The river is brown near
the sand, loose banks and twigs
stick at the edge and a lilac’s
silhouette of a dog.
How in the dark hole can I hide
if I can’t get outside?
Then I won’t remember
what I did to deserve it.
That arch and bridge
will form a shape of repentance.
If I’m hanging,
then judgment has been passed.
And I am hanging
upside-down
head swinging towards the moon.
Years of inversion.
A face in a mirror displaced
by its position outside silver.
And so?
Next will come muscle,
a little grief but no shoulder.
You’re learning how to be a unit
with an infinite in its attic.
It’s not difficult.
Light is the last message.
Then white streaks like oil paint
are the first to appear along the wet railing.
The ghost was soaked
and swelled into a human being
so close to resurrection
I could see the genius
of institutional religion.
Examine your conscience
until you are a postulant
who has only one sin to offer God.
Soon you’ll wash that thing off
(scented by its parallel past) and pause.
What were your feet thinking in their hurry
to connect the parts?
Get the children to the other side!
What children? You were the one running.
There was never any other.
Now the sun is like a yolk that broke
into the corridor.
Sleepwalk through its gold
and you will see the original glitter
that lit our move to the lounge.
“I’m looking for a restaurant
with a baby spoon and knife.”
“May I consult my psychic?”
A long shadow will mean your back’s to the sun
and you can’t empty the space you occupy anymore
expecting to see another opening.
The moods of strangers
determine your day.
Will the driver be kind?
Please God let him be.
This is poverty, not just
second childhood
in a divided city.
But my thanks to the soul-heat
of the one who works the register
and shakes the bag.
Infinite nesting pushes all matter
towards emptiness:
child-nodes,
tree-droppings
with a root element of null.
None is always included
in every cluster
of children.
Nothing in nothing
prepares us.
Yet a fresh light was shed
on immortality
for me climbing the stairs
firm foot first.
Everything was in the banister:
crows on branches, crickets,
architects, handsaws and democrats.
Red moon at 3 a.m.
Why Did I Dream
Why did I dream of Mohammed today?
Through the folding sheets he expressed his relief
that his words reached no modern critics.
He was, he said, only a poet.
I think I know what he meant
like the Uzbek scenes
that make up that whole trilogy by Ali Khamraev.
The robot that Nebuchadnezzar owned
was hard to pull apart or analyze without ruining
each click.
A series of scenes that could never take place
might drive people to theorize.
I tried the night after
but woke up struggling with machines
a helpless elder with fingers too weak to bend the bits around the neck.
Flame-Light
In Anatolia (where I’ve never been) the saffron hills seem to border
an ocean and the orange car lights mime the same in the sky.
A hospital and autopsy room and the body are being ripped apart without respect:
A heart slapped in a bucket: dirt in the trachea and lungs.
A hospital worker was better than a physician to the body.
Good with her hands in a bucket
like a worker at the till in a supermarket.
She said we have everything in reverse.
As an example a red corpuscle flew from the corpse
onto the collar of the detective
who could name the properties in a drop of blood
and this way prove there is no God.
The Cloisters
You stand with the rest of the children holding hands.
Your little aunt with a fox-skin on her shoulder is showing you
unicorns in a tapestry and the words:
“Please wash and love me.”
Did she go to heaven when the membranes
of The Book were flipped
by the wind on the hospital roof?
She wanted to, and not.
Smoke from the vent gray sheets on which some days are written
flew apart in entropy’s tendency towards a disorder seemingly insane.
Angelopoulos
Pulpy islands streak the fog and unify the effect of gray.
Even electric lights have contours of shade
because there’s too much stuff from the recent past,
a gray glassiness behind every lens.
Silver is always weak.
Three church spires in one little city pebbles of rain.
Again, the electric lights: in a strand like citrine.
Globs of errors open for the two
gay guys railing markers over wet piers.
A sick flag buffers in air. Why is the boy dancing?
He’s white and seems to want attention.
But it’s the fatherless children the father follows.
Sometimes
Sometimes a twinkle
gets in my eyes.
It’s like a rhinestone
on a prom dress.
It shoots light
so bright I can’t blink
without tears.
If I pump my temples
with my fists
and close my eyes
it reddens in blood.
This is only one possibility
besides the metaphysical.
Sometimes it’s
a prick of sweat
or a word or a prophet
sweating at a bus stop.
There are gangs
who would kill to know what to name
such a gem because there is none.
A Child in Old Age
Every room is still a mansion to you:
you who wants to live in an Irish hotel!
To sit in a lobby beside the fire with your feet in a chair.
To stare at the other children seeking asylum.
Your brain is a baby.
And all the ancients are in it still.
Your heart is a channel
and a crib for them.
They rarely come down
or out in the light
but steer you awkwardly with their cries.
Your brain is still becoming
an independent being
while your heart always needs air.
I had an infant who was an orphan who lived between my ears.
Its sobs could only be heard
when it circled the pump.
How it hurt!
Another i
nfant lived like an octopus fully exposed
with a skull like a bottle cap inside its thought.
It was the arms of my heart.
A heart is a mind that’s only trying
to think without an unconscious.
The tentacle is a brain too.
And its adaptable jelly’s
just as intelligent as human blood.
Sometimes you look into a baby’s eyes.
“Bless her,” you suggest to passersby
yourself being old and unnecessary.
But no one does.
Please, you beg. The tears of an infant can be bottled and hidden
for special occasions.
One drop on your tongue and you won’t ask for more.
You’ve thought this somewhere before.
Born Below
Born below a second time.
The shade of the first cast across and down.
Never shakes it off.
Her mouth.
“Don’t smile. It’s ugly. You’ll get lines.”
The shade symbolizes an object in front of the sun:
a blotted person
and subversion.
Her hand over her eyes indicates she herself is blocking the light.
Never the best.
The best has good taste and self-preservation, pride in property.
What will we do with the others?
She grows very little without light but stays weak
(and hangs at the apartment window
lacking attention doesn’t adapt).
She’s a midget in a mighty nation.
An eclipse of the face.
What could be the value of being shaded
in broad daylight.
Of being aged in the night.
Of learning the secular rule of life.
The Coldest Mother
I can only follow one stone through
to its interior: and I do.
An amethyst from Achill.
The stone is transparent violet.
Firelight plays with its color the way eyes play with tears.
It’s cold where east is north and the earth is flat
and a person grows old.
Equivalence—no matter at what distance.
The fluttering snow is at the mercy of
ever-increasing crescents crossing circles
