Love and Death Speaking at Once
We come together. To love someone means to imagine
their death. 2 a.m. and you lie awake in fear of us. What if?
What if? Call your mother. Say you’re sorry. Call your
father. What? Call your sister. Memory sustains
and fades. Take a picture. Keep a journal. Underline,
doggy-ear, leave margin-notes in your book, mark it
with your touch. Do not go into a mountain alone.
Write the letter that embarrasses you, adulating,
undulating language, each line a petal in a dahlia.
Fields of swaying dahlias, you make them.
Yes, you can. Give that person a bouquet of dahlias,
grown, then cut for you; that is us, together. We are beautiful
together. If we make in you such tender-hearted anticipation—
is it so bad?
Body Of
My mother, teaching me how to protect my body:
when a man touches you here, yell I am a body
that will bear a child. How was I,
a child, to understand that as the sanctity
of my body. How was I to know to say,
The body without that potential is also whole
and holy. A man who touches a child
does not care whether she will one day be
fertile. A dear friend, on making the body
useful, encourages me to have
babies. What does it mean to say I have
my body. I have a brain, you know, I have
a life, a heart, I’ve said before, meaning
only mine, without knowing there were
outlines of other bodies fleshing in my center,
being the body of woman, for whom,
body means collective. As it is for the body
of evidence. Of knowledge. Here I present my body
of work. My body of water. Here, my body,
body. But we, are we? Of our bodies? Bodies are thrown
across oceans, across lands. Bodies lie
bleeding through the evidence of bullets. Honest
bodies bleeding honestly. In order to continue living,
we try to leave evidence of our lives. We accumulate
bodies in whatever way we can. Men leave
themselves in women’s bodies.
Friends, I am just now ready to love my own. I love
my father’s eyebrows on my face and I love
my mother’s calves on my legs and I love
the parts of my body that I do not name.
Let that be enough. The future of this land is uncertain
in how high the flames, the waters, will be.
This land in which I still bleed,
this land in which I give up
something every day.
Decency
When a man threw his fist into a wall next to my eye
I said that was love, that love was rage.
I was in the habit of loving anyone who laid a cold hand
on my face and said he’d pray for me.
Or anyone who prays. I thought apology
was love and so I loved to hear a man say sorry.
I loved to forgive because it meant I was a goddess. I forgave
because he couldn’t possibly forgive himself.
There’s a demon inside me, he said. Who cares if it’s a demon
when it is mine and I am greedy for it. No, and I don’t care,
do you hear me?—I’d say, and greed seemed to river
through my body. Even years later I could not speak of men
and their violence because I wanted to believe, yes,
in such a thing as decency in men I loved, that love
was decent. All the men who wanted me beautiful,
wanted me thin, wanted me with short hair, wanted me less
smart, wanted me, wanted me not, wanted me with pink
cheeks, wanted the best for me, wanted me in ruffled
skirts, wanted me naked, wanted me dead, all the men,
who wanted me, men who wanted, men who are
gone, not gone
enough.
Affection
We watch the moving topography of brutality, the red slopes
and orbs mapping deaths from the virus, from fire, from firearms.
It feels impossible to think red and visualize beauty and yet
red roses are splashed all around the city, so brazenly alive
that they stupefy me. People stop, pose, take pictures
of their loved ones under the mess of flowers.
I love the red beak of the rose-ringed parakeet even after I find
the threat they pose on the land I live. Affection means both fondness and disease.
Words reflect the world, which is to say nothing makes sense.
If we say only civilization can finish the world,
does it mean to complete or destroy? If we say the world might weather—
to endure or wear away?
Elsewhere
A burro walks into a lake and kills herself
after losing her newborn, and I believe in an elsewhere.
When my dog died, the other dog
did not kill herself. She did not walk from room to room or stop eating.
Theorists have wondered, does animal suicide mean suicide,
meaning, do animals speculate about the future,
meaning, do they understand death. I think what they mean
is if animals know that death means the end,
the whales beaching themselves, the dolphins
ceasing to breathe, the deer leaping off a precipice
leaving behind a pack of hunting dogs, my dog
who died, my dog who did not kill herself—
and I want to say when the donkey stepped
into the water and when the whale leaned
against the aired sand and the dear leapt
into the sky, they chose an elsewhere,
which is not to say the end.
My mind is often elsewhere. My dog knew
the other dog was elsewhere, wherever that was.
Elsewhere, the wild moon spins with its moons,
bottlenose dolphins sway in sleep. A tree grows fruit
in a dream. When Kathy the dolphin was captured
and put elsewhere, perhaps she thought the way to move
to another elsewhere was to change her breathing, her body.
Do you think I am an optimist and a romantic?
I am terrified of death and dark
and hell and heaven. But here, now, because of the burro, I believe
in elsewhere, I swear, that when I am dead I’ll be there,
wherever that is, but truly,
I’ll be everyone else’s elsewhere, when everyone is everywhere
else, which is to say is also elsewhere.
I’ll be elsewhere,
just as how here, now, I am, in my room, alone,
anonymous to every lake I’ve never touched.
Related Matters
I look at the ocean like it’s goodbye.
Somewhere, it is touching a land laying prey to fire.
My grieving mother brings the forest inside, a green excess.
When she repots the trees, it is not unlike changing diapers.
But she no longer tends to the small abject frames of the dying.
These days, everything feels like the end.
A few days ago, a typhoon shaved glass off buildings.
A woman in her sixties bled to death after it cut
the window into her arm. The name of the wind, Maysak,
means teak tree in Khmer, I learn. The timber
retains its aromatic fragrance to a great age, I learn. I am always
learning. What is it that I want
to know? There is nowhere in this world
that I want to live. I look at your face
like it’s goodbye. There is nowhere to go.
I shut my window because what else
can I do. Tomorrow’s typhoon is called Hǎishén,
meaning sea god in Mandarin. I confess
I want to live. Nowhere, but still, with great desperation, I want.
What is it that you want?
Tell me, is your face the same as mine?
Tell me, do we see the same things?
Tell me we are the same eyes
Burning through the night.