Four Interiors
—after Mark Rothko, “Four Darks in Red” (1958)
1.
Could I gaze through the wall of my mother’s belly to the encompassing glow? Sun on the streets of Manhattan, her pointy heels clacking on the sidewalk. And through those months, beyond the visible, the world’s end waiting to be launched. Dark of the light. Could I see that too? I would always see it.
2.
The elevator in our apartment building ticked up floors. Sometimes it didn’t stop at 6 but kept going, faster and faster. I braced for the locked box to smash into the roof. That never happened. The only thing that ever happened I was not braced for: the woman who glanced at me and muttered “Kike.”
3.
The twist within, the band of ache. Imagining the shape of it. Seeing without seeing the red lake that traveled with me and trickled out. How much time spent traversing that hidden landscape. Clang of the metal receptacles in the bathroom stalls at school. Secretly I would hold back the lid and peer inside.
4.
Before I could say what the spiritual was, for no one had taught me, I stepped carefully down the cool white gallery halls. Seeking an expanse of darkness that would light me up within, an emptiness that would open. I learned the artist was one of us, had lived here too. It was a mystery but I could come near.
* * * * *
Distance Prayer
I sat on the footstool between my mother’s knees as she watched TV. The wicker armchair creaked as she leaned forward. I remember the weave of her jeans against my cheek, the round bone of her thigh, the trace of her perfume, so I know I laid my head against her leg sometimes. She would scratch my back and shoulders lightly. She would call me Angelique. We were close and we were not. The world was full of things we could not say, so many I barely noticed them.
*
Later, there was a woman to whom I could finally tell it all. Whom I could never, of course, touch. Whose living room I would never enter. Then and all the years after she went away, when I felt so cut off I didn’t know how I would live, I would ask myself what it was I longed for. I recalled her corona of fine blonde hair backlit by the office window, and all I could imagine was kneeling on the ground before her and resting my dark head in her lap.
*
To speak, to touch: the same dream of what is impossible. This is a secret few understand. This is the light for which language does not exist.
*
In the shower, the water beats from me some stray thought of weakness or wanting or failure. And each time I hear myself whisper oh angel as I turn from it in shame and tenderness. Who is it that I long for then? What do I implore to absolve me, to draw near the rough beast of my humanity?
*
Whenever it comes, that distant touching where two minds meet and the chatter in the room grows faint, still that image wings through me — the wish to lay my head.
*
The longing for what you cannot reach is half of what defines the holy. Cherishing everything imagined in its absence. A love in quarantine.
*
And this is my prayer as all life is swallowed in separation: oh love, oh world, oh vast lost mothering, let me rest my head in your green lap. Oh angel, come to me now who loves as she has always done, only more.
* * * * *
Mala
Wyoming, 1988
Honky-tonk played in the Dubois bar.
We were hotel-clean after a week on horseback
in the scouring wind and dust.
The pack of buddies I’d shrunk from at the tents
drank and danced and flirted, not with me,
and the trail cook I’d liked so much
had his hands on another rider’s jeans.
Where was that woman with the arctic eyes
who’d sought me out to talk in quiet places,
the one who barely looked at them, steady
in her indifference, older than I,
me halfway understanding, but afraid?
The screen door wailed as I stepped out
to sit against the wall. The music,
bootscrapes, laughter muffled now
in the emptiness of the raw western street
sounded like hearing my name, hearing
a call I’d known from the beginning.
A dog without a collar sidled up
and I petted him into bliss. You are so good;
I love you, love you, love you.
The night wrapped my wrist like a string of beads.
I didn’t know if I wanted it different or not;
I knew whatever it was, it was going to stay.
* * * * *
John Donne: A Closet Drama
All night in Oxford after the one-man show on you, I tossed
in my tiny dorm bed with a historical crush, or was it the cramps
that wracked me like adoration? I’d read your work in class, thrilled to
the metaphors of desire and God — potent, jagged enough to touch
what experience really felt like. Already I sensed it meant being broken.
But your long nose and full lips in that young portrait — I could see
you were a man who’d expect things of a woman, the kind I ran from.
Maker, don’t put the make on me, I’ll be a county over in a flash.
I’d never be your Anne, willing — let’s hope happy — to crank out
twelve kids of yours then die. Yet I had no doubt your grief was real,
and made the poem I’d later recite, weeping my way across Chicago:
I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave / Of all that’s nothing. It wasn’t you
I wanted, just words to name that midnight counter-life of loss.
Just an unimpeachable male speaker, saying things I still could not.