Elegy Falling Forward & Down

1.

In A Kiss Before Dying, Robert Wagner pushes

his girlfriend off a roof, making it look like suicide,

in order to detonate her womb’s

bomb himself. Joanne Woodward’s

character, the great disruptor by the very nature

of her womanhood & her wealth. My mother

says, Yeah, he probably got the idea to kill

Natalie Wood from this role, & she is more

than half serious. These are the kinds of conversations

we have because there is no other choice

in this violence. Splendor in the Grass

displayed the first French kiss on film, compared

sex to the stock market.

2.

Sex is like the stock market,

& the woman who enjoys sex cannot leave a movie

screen without punishment. The scene with Ginny

(named for the liquor), her neck thrown back

& out like a dog belly-up, not in the style

of pleasure but vulnerability, a crowd of men

in tuxedos waiting for their turn at parceling

her body into eighths. It is still so difficult

to know what to fear, so we fear everything

& more—the new century’s anxiety

closing in on itself, until the decades just get

better at making caution shape its body so that we

don’t recognize it as strange.

Mom asks how long I will write about this.

3.

              Mom asks, How long will you write about this?

as a new Laci Peterson documentary

appears as one of my suggested titles on Hulu.

                            We were in a motel, getting ready

for Carrie’s wedding, & Laci was still missing,

& though memory is disciplined in what it leaves out,

I can recall the intimacy of sharing a last name:

                             Rocha.

That which should lull instead rings an alarm.

                            Lots of horses were found dead

                            that month in Texas, the story goes,

                            they followed one another into a river

                            & drowned. Memory’s tongue in thirsty

                            petals, like carnations decorating the chapel.

4.

                            Petals, carnations decorate the chapel

at her funeral. A funeral says so little about this world,

just undecipherable grief—dark, dark water.

                                                         Heaven bares its knuckles.

                            When they recovered Natalie Wood’s

body one mile from the Splendour,

she was dressed for bed. When they recovered

what was left of Laci’s torso, sea life had started

to inhabit there, putting breath back where it was,

making honorary lungs.

                                          —So much like my rage

finding habitat in between tight columns of ribs, bone

replaced by imposter cells. My imposter blood body

                            falling forward & down.

5.

6.

                            Falling forward & down

              because of the homemade weights he attached

to her limbs. All that time, she was keeping the San Francisco Bay in its place.

              Everything in this world is theirs, except doubt.

                            That is solely ours.

       I’m often asked why I won’t go hiking on a date,

              why I think going for a swim is coercion from a polite intruder:

                            I’ve seen myself falling from a cliff in the bodies of other women.

                            I’ve seen myself struggling underwater in the sponges.

                            I’ve seen myself face-to-face with the bestial bluff.

                            I’ve seen myself the awful blue of night’s chokehold.

                            I’ve seen myself putting blood back into the cherries.

                                                        Theirs, ours. Theirs ours.

                                                        If there is an opportunity to destroy, it will be.

7.

Because there is too much to destroy, it will be,

& when it is happening, it has already happened.

This procession of verbs, loaded into a cannon.

Separating moments by tense makes it seem

as though they are unrelated & very far from each other.

My grandmother says she’s spent her whole life

thinking about this—how she’ll die a sad woman

but that she survived. In that we don’t ask for much,

it’s like we’re not asking at all: the smallness of ours.

Nominal ours. The rivers have been straining

long before we have, as the water I hold in my hands

breaks into black butterflies, a hope to reverse

what we can & leave the rest. In search of, an approximation:

              desire of, love of.