The Mobius Strip Club of Grief Read online

  The pollen is aching.

  When it’s time,

  the competition is fierce here in the air.

  25,000 males assemble and compete for a single, deadly orgasm.

  Progeny is everything here.

  Our motto is:

  I’d rather be dead than share you with another.

  Emily Dickinson

  Some nights she comes to act as courier,

  midwife to our own skills.

  Emily, come like a UFO to implant her genius in us.

  Our Queen Mab, condemned to be the only woman mentioned

  in the lyric omnibuses of her epoch;

  easy scapegoat of men’s centuries,

  she stood in for all women.

  So now, of course, she comes to blow off steam

  in the privacy of the green room.

  All those living years she walked from yard to yard,

  gardens flourished in opium poppies;

  went out at night to see the owls and wed her genius.

  She applied her passion like a hot iron sword.

  And no one can take off her clothes, ever—she comes

  and her language takes them off of us,

  not piece by piece, not fumbling buttons,

  but all at once in a single shot,

  her tiny poems like grenades that fit in the hand.

  And we here bask in the debris,

  stripped down to our private parts,

  the snow white of the bone, the authentic corpse in heat.

  The absolute original.

  Math

  I used to sit in the bathroom stall at school

  and weep

  about math—

  But it is possible here

  in the nightclub of naked, spiritual wellness

  for those who never got it before.

  It’s a kind of vanity

  you can commiserate over with strippers

  who fall under the mathematical term homeomorphism,

  which means if you stretch and stretch

  you can make a version of yourself out of them;

  their topological space is equal to our own,

  just as a doughnut and coffee mug are equal.

  Do you understand?

  There’s so much to learn.

  An even number of nipples

  swaying in the strobe-lit main thoroughfare;

  the murmuring of understanding,

  ah-ha moments of orgasm

  like reaching an original state of consciousness,

  that brief moment of freedom

  from the memory of your education.

  The strippers will bend over you

  at your tiny round table

  breathing cream-and-sugar coffee into your ear

  asking you if you need anything;

  rethink this,

  check your math—

  I’m here for you, the ancestry says

  placing a gold star on your cheek

  where an F should be.

  I Am Unfaithful to You with My Genius

  I

  There are no time periods this does not extend to. It’s a priori, omnipotent, a salon of the underworld, full of noblesse with their vast sprinkling of literature and philosophy. Women of letters who cast about in their intimate coteries the halo of their own genius. Women who go at it with trumpet & lyre, not flute, nor harp; and men in wild metamorphoses—to hell with Time, they say, wandering in and out of the confines of your little world, hoping upon hope to pull you out of the past and into the gorgeous, death-rattling moment.

  II

  When we die we strip—wash, harden, burn, urinate, bloat, grind into a fine powder, into a paste, spread on the endless paper cuts of our descendants. There is no room for modesty in this vague realism. But hours after the moment of death the body below the head looks creepily good—have you seen the dead stripped? Death’s last-minute cosmetic surgery, the skin taut from gravity, confined in beauty for one last hurrah.

  Then we lie naked before nature and let her ravish us—undoing everything.

  III

  Ladies, enjoy the pleasures of your own mind! The creative woman in this living patriarchy wants to be both object and subject of creation. Blow up your television, love me instead, my genius says to me.

  IV

  “Inspire, but do not write,” said Lebrun in his poem “To lovely ladies who want to be poets”:

  The Gods created you for love

  Love would look with anger burning

  To see you waste your night on poems.

  V

  “I feel a little worthless with your pregnancy,” my husband said, coming home after Magic: The Gathering; my husband, full of whiskey, beside me on the bed, began describing his realization that men created a patriarchal society in order to be indispensable. Simple scientific preparation of a sperm bank could make them totally valueless. When men saw what women could create, they freaked out. And from that crippling feeling of inadequacy at being unable to bear children, men went on to prove that they were the best creators. I thought this was a very wise observation, and I agreed.

  “Inspire, but do not write,” said Lebrun to women, hoping that women would not notice that we were already built to write; born, ourselves, a loaded gun, ready to produce language and meaning and sense.

  VI

  True, women like to inspire; they are not greedy about it. They temper their minds in order to give. It’s a delicate blending of many gifts, not the supremacy of a single one. “It implies taste and versatility, with fine discrimination, and the tact to sink one’s personality as well as to call out the best in others.”

  VII

  Ponce Denis Écouchard Lebrun, the French Reign of Terror’s official poet. And in his private life, he wielded his particular horrors, beating his wife in his rages. His own mother and sister helped her escape. Critics agree, a few fine strophes, but not one good ode. Drink to his death. To his failures.

  VIII

  But then, perhaps it is I who eat the bread of a different failure. Never a flower. Never the beautiful white heifer who wandered among the black and green seaweeds, wondering what the hell had happened. I was never hidden by Jove. I cannot write about beauty, which rankles and drives no chariot of fire before me, but instead lies out on a slab of wood in the rain, and stays neither wet nor dry.

  And my education: I did not learn but as I went, plodding, inelegant through institutions, like my women before me. When I sit down to write I feel unfaithful, to someone, to something. Why should I do one thing over another? Like when pulling a wildflower out of a patch of flowers, my flesh cannot determine, anymore, why this and not that. I burn everything down so it might grow back. I love the sexual dichotomy of myths and legends. I watch the usurped tremble with lust from a tiny dais in the moment. And it feels almost good to glower through my life. To listen to the old guard at the podiums in small, New England towns, speaking of women at cocktail parties, “who dress to be seen” but are quickly undressed by men’s eyes (the joke’s on them!). It feels good to nod in the back row, knowingly, as Anne Geneviève de Bourbon, Duchesse de Longueville, no doubt did at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, yawning over the scholarly discourse of Balzac, enduring the endless disputes over rival sonnets. Long, tiresome, beautiful poems—I can listen, and nod. I can live. While the female gnostic god locates herself in the self, potential recognized in a flash in the mirror as in a horror movie—aboriginal self, entity anonymous—

  The neon yet taupe and pale-purple sunset sets in your loins. The god indoors knits, patient as a Whistler, while outside the satanic establishment edits your skin like a bruise

  IX

  You, your husband, your children—whose genius am I among? You plucked the pencil from your lover’s hand. I’m sitting in his old office in your spinning wooden chair, and now you both are dead. He hanged himself, and you died of pneumonia. Out in the backyard, farthest from the brook, you lie like a vampire in your box. If I could go out and di
g you up and rub your leathered face with mine, I would—like Antigone I would ruin myself for you. Your skull is so close. Your body so near—I could stand on it like a stage. Bow, and let the lights fade. Raised like a poem is raised—far too undone; a single wolf, stalker, woman’s external demon of genius—mad genius—the best kind of person to suffer for

  raised up at the feet; and I know no other—

  “Fall at the feet of this sex to whom you owe your mother.”

  II

  The natural sublime is intimately bound up with place, often occasioned by a beauty that is painful, and entangled with the grief we experience at the overwhelming losses we have inflicted on the natural world and one another in relation to it.

  —Bonnie Mann, Women’s Liberation and the Sublime:

  Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment

  Making Applesauce with My Dead Grandmother

  I dig her up and plop her down in a wicker chair.

  She’s going to make applesauce and I’m going to get drunk.

  She’s cutting worms out of the small green apples from the backyard

  and I’m opening a bottle. It erects like a tower

  in the city of my mouth.

  The way she makes applesauce, it has ragged

  strips of skin and spreads thickly over toast.

  It’s famous; eating it is as close to God as I’m going to get,

  but I don’t tell her. There’s a dishtowel wrapped around her head

  to keep her jaw from falling slack—

  Everything hurts.

  But I don’t tell her that either. I have to stand at the call box

  and see what words I can squeeze in. I’m getting worried.

  If I dig her up and put her down in the wicker chair

  I’d better be ready for the rest of the family

  to make a fuss about it. I’d better bring her back right.

  The whole house smells of cinnamon and dust.

  We don’t speak. She’s piling up the worms, half-alive

  in a silver bowl, she’s throwing them back into the ground

  right where her body should be.

  How Not

  Be completely dispassionate about the theoretical five stages.

  This is an old death, but it’s your death. Complete the stages

  in blurring fits of inebriation. Eat everything in sight. Fight

  with your mother. Marry Ben in the woods. Fly across

  the country. Stand in the street with the raging legless

  angel. Hold a brick wall very close to your face.

  Interior Design

  How fabulous that humans are able to decorate from their minds. In a sense, they splatter their brains on the walls, translate texture from the head onto objects; carve into the very tusk, chisel onto the veranda, sew into quilts and lay them over the bodies of guests.

  And what joy I get from that. From décor. From personal flair.

  (Just look at the detail! Velvet. Chintz. Oak. Mint-condition. Patina. Hand-stitched . . .)

  Even an absence of objects reflects a certain taste.

  *

  I hold court all day on my own intellectual shortcomings.

  It doesn’t matter anymore. I’m led through hallways

  into blue and gold vestiges

  of the old rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre

  and the historic apartments that adorned it.

  I enter the rank beauty of my women’s homes:

  the familiar minute details of hoarding; draperies

  in mixed scenes of toile, Venetian lamps, boxes, endless mail,

  vases large enough to hold a child, filled with flowers

  on their last legs, scattering the perfume of almost-decay.

  I rendezvous in the living room with Mom.

  I feel like your rejection slips, collated in a folder. Outdated science magazine

  of inaccurate information—

  I would love to “move on.” But I carry you around like a scar,

  forgetting sometimes that it is even there

  until I follow a stranger’s eye to it during a handshake.

  *

  My father-in-law keeps his wife’s ashes in a tiny silver golf bag around his neck.

  His favorite word is nice. When the service is “nice,” the world makes sense. He wants the world to do a nice job.

  If I could, I’d have kept a nice bone from your hand,

  a notch of your middle finger, or a long clavicle; your whole skull . . .

  But I would not have kept ashes.

  Ashes remind me of my childhood,

  shoveling them into a metal bucket from the woodstove

  and sneaking them across the road

  to dump in the cow field—Mom crying out for a load of wood

  on my way back in—to me, ashes are too

  anonymous.

  *

  Ah, so posh, so tasteful in grief. Some aesthetic leftover from the Greeks

  mingled with the late booty of colonialism.

  It fills me with a sense of leadership just being among the collected, the amassed,

  the eccentric.

  If I were to make a banner for my House it might be

  a gray owl with its talons outstretched,

  a 1989 Toyota broken down on the side of the road,

  a blue jay in the center field of black wheat stalks,

  a woman’s silhouette at the center of a pentagram—

  my flag would be so Metal, so Hardcore,

  with a touch of the feminine, beaux esprits.

  Something of gallantry,

  integrity, and science, all wrapped up in one emblematic clutch—

  Nothing was ever “nice” in my family.

  They bear an intensity that allows

  only for extremes:

  It’s always been either “You’re a genius!”

  Or “You’re a Hitler.”

  Flight

  Someone told Mom it takes six months to realize

  someone is no longer on the planet.

  On a commuter plane from Portland to Seattle

  it was exactly six months later,

  on the tiniest plane in the world.

  I broke out in hives

  like a nun blushing all over for God—

  a sweeping bloodshot victory

  eating everything

  while the other feelings starve—

  the plane shook, and I grabbed the leg of the woman sitting next to me.

  She looked taken aback, then returned to her real-

  estate magazine

  without a word

  while silvery tears rolled down my face onto a

  book called VALIS,

  which was open onto the first page.

  Strangers shake in the breeze of my cannonball looks—

  out the round window I could see below me

  Washington State

  and the same repeated genus of spruce.

  I happened to have a pamphlet with me, Important Trees of Eastern Forests

  from 1968. I opened to the swamp cottonwood, which grows in Mom’s front yard.

  Whenever I fly

  I feel that I’m being forced to accept my own death.

  And now, simultaneously,

  I was being forced to accept the death of someone else.

  I knew that once I accepted it, I could accept the free sample

  of local Washington beer in plastic party cups the

  flight attendants came around with

  like a blessed and bitter medicinal syrup

  pulled from a prehistoric wheat.

  The Reading

  It’s her birthday the day I read with Mark at the bookstore in Iowa.

  I’m terribly hungover. I tell Mark to read his long poem

  about the crushing, overpowering beauty and intellect of women.

  I’ve eaten myself into an enormous oblivion.

  My whole face screams LACK OF RESTRAINT.

  I take my
time at the reading. Let each word leap

  and plummet, and lie down in front of me.

  It’s like there’re no punches to pull. Like there’s no weather.

  It’s like I’m reading in a vacuum of my own dehydrated vileness.

  It’s like I’m reversing; blowing everything back into a joint

  and missing phone calls. It’s like I’m standing in a fresco,

  powdering myself in a cloud of dried lime.

  It’s like she’s hiding in a sleeping bag on the front porch,

  and I have to climb in with her and tell her she’s dead.

  Self-Destruction Sequence

  Regarding falling asleep

  waiting for my group to be called

  to enter the tunnel

  that would have taken me

  to 26D—

  I nodded off, the plane left

  without me

  in my neck pillow