April to May
1.
It is cold enough for rain
to coagulate and fall in heavy drops.
Tonight a skin of ice will grow
over the bones of the smallest bush,
making it droop like the wrist
of someone carrying a heavy suitcase. This moving on,
from season to season, is exhausting
and violent, the break from the Berlin Wall
of winter especially. Like a frostbitten
hand coming to life, I color
first with warmth,
then with pain. Thawing, letting
the great powers go
their own way, in rivers and in flesh,
frightens me, as this day
warns me of an icy night.
2.
Each year I am astonished
at the havoc wrought
on other lives: fathers
made tiny by cancer;
a mother swollen around
a bad heart "brought on by aggravation."
To suffer is to do something new
yet always the same—
a change of life
from the sexual dread. Some women
wish they were men, some men
wish they were dead; still,
there is coin in suffering . . .
It makes us rich
as Croesus in his golden tears,
and we are rarely hated for it.
This coin I store in a purse
made of my mother's
milk and flesh, which God says I must not mix.
I use it instead to seek pleasure.
3.
Walking around with this thing in me
all day, this loving cup
full of jelly, waiting for you
to come home—seven o'clock,
eight o'clock, eight-thirty . . .
What could be more important
than love? I can't imagine; you can.
Not a good day, not about to get better.
4.
The bird comes complete
with heart, liver, and neck-bone
wrapped chastely in white paper.
Still half-frozen,
the legs are hard to separate.
Inside, wax paper sticks to the ribs.
I reach like a vet delivering pigs,
or a boy finger-fucking a virgin.
5.
Air the same sweet
temperature inside the house
as outside the house.
Stepping up from the cellar
with an armful of sheets,
I listen for the dirge of flies
under the chittering birds,
both painfully loud. There is a stridency
that's stubborn in a life
grown by inches: the fat
little fingers of buds bursting;
ugly ducklings; the slow war
of day against night.
As I pin the swelling sheets
with clothespins damp and too
narrow at the mouth, I wonder how
flies know to come out
to feed the birds, and feast themselves
on the new stillborn, this stubborn
great chain of being.
Copyright Credit: Joyce Peseroff, "April to May" from A Dog in the Lifeboat. Copyright © 1991 by Joyce Peseroff. Reprinted by permission of Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Source: A Dog in the Lifeboat (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1991)