The Living Teaching

You wanted to be a butcher

but they made you be a lawyer.

You brought home presents

when it was nobody’s birthday.

Smashed platters of meat

she cut against the grain.

Were a kind

of portable shrine —

I was supposed to cultivate a field of bliss,

then return to my ordinary mind.

You burned the files

and moved the office.

Made your children fear

a different school.

Liked your butter hard

and your candy frozen.

Were a kind

of diamond drill, drilling a hole

right through my skull —

quality sleep, late November.

What did it mean, “field of bliss” —

A sky alive “with your greatest mentor” —

I wore your shoes, big as boats,

flopped through the house —

while you made garlic eggs with garlic salt, what

“represents the living teaching” —

Sausages on toasted rye with a pickle,

and a smother of cheese, and

frosting

right out of the can without the cake —

You ruled

with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, you raged

at my stony mother, while I banged

from my high chair, waving

the bloodied bone

of something slaughtered — I was

a butcher’s daughter.

So all hail to me —

Os Gurges, Vortex Mouth, I gap my craw

and the bakeries of the cities fall, I

stomp the docks — spew out a bullet stream

of oyster shells, I’ll

drain the seas — the silos

on every farm, the rice

from the paddy fields, the fruit

from all the orchard trees, and then I’ll

eat the trees —

I’ll eat with money and I’ll eat

with my teeth until the rocks

and the mountains curl

and my blood sings —

I’m such a good girl

to eat the world.

Source: Poetry (September 2014)