How It Felt

Even if I still had the clothes I wore,

those first twelve years, even if I had

the clothes I would take off before my mother

climbed the stairs toward me: the glassy

Orlon sweater; the cotton dress,

under its smocking my breasts-to-be

accordion-folded under the skin of my chest;

even if I had all the sashes,

even if I had all the cotton

underwear, like a secret friend,

I think I could not get back to how

it felt. I study the stability

of the spirit — was it almost I who came back

out of each punishment,

back to a self which had been waiting, for me,

in the cooled-off pile of my clothes? As for the

condition of being beaten, what

was it like: going into a barn, the animals

not in stalls, but biting, and shitting, and

parts of them on fire? And when my body came out

the other side, and I checked myself,

10 fingers, 10 toes,

and I checked whatever I had where we were

supposed to have a soul, I hardly dared

to know what I knew,

that though I had been taken down,

again, hammer and tongs, valley

and range, down to the ground of my being

and under that ground, it was possible

that in my essence, at the center of my essence, in some

tiny chamber my mother could not

enter — or did not enter — I had not been changed.