After Miscarriage, Breast Milk: The Nine Lives of Suicide

After Miscarriages Breast Milk:  Her Nine Lives

of Suicide

I have.  Don’t think I haven’t.  I have.  The cross-

            beams in the basement?  Those brown chains spread

            like concussions of a burial dirt, the rough

            cut hardwood of this old house is sloughing

            off its umber.  No: the window into the this cellar

            is blacked by grass and shadow, clods and sods

            that push the crowds of air along through the cracks.

            Because air sneaks in, the way water sneaks in, it finds

            my one place along my bit lip and slips in, clothed head

            to toe unnoticed and sets, pectin quiet.

I have, ok, I have.  If not those chains the shiny

            kitchen knives I take to beef, slice through

            grizzle as through suet.  It's like just- whipped-       

            after- dinner- cream, though no pain at all but this

            tepid bath he’d, in mornings, boil for me and carry to the tub

            and rub my skin my scalp and I wanted to I did, slip

            under the bubble of it, near the plug, lift it...

            but I couldn’t feel a thing other than the water

            going cold and the goose sprung when I stood, I couldn’t

            holding my arms wide as wings wanting to lift the sky

            that had fallen down on them and push it aside

            like the absolute weightless thing it was supposed to be

            but wasn’t.

I have.  The chains, the blades, the lye in the barn, the warm

            stretch of skin and throat beneath each palm’s consideration

            and all those gone-before-me-babies preparing the table...

            my only living boy gone just the other day?  A year ago? and the new one

            getting ready, I know the cramps I know the blood 

            in the tin bowl will be a bawl stuffed with her nearly noticeable

            fist, like hunger, the way Merrill would cram his in, so deep in,

            it was food until I could bring my milk to a bead, two, three, like poppies

            in their pods, and later a squeezed cheesecloth, each deep, 

            drawn from God knows how sleep.  And the relief peace the after.

            Not like now.  The chap the scab I can't let

            alone.  They fill again.  They spread like legs when I lay and leak on

            their brink again, but not right away.  Slow.  A plugging duct.  Slow,

            the close sway of a hanging thing, paused, paused, the blue

            stilling of the sucked up then tightly gagged noose.  

I don't.  You know I don't.  But I can.  I want to and I can.  The table's

            set.  Sit.  Sit.

Taking on Water

Taking on Water

Water, you cork and dole

your benevolence

like it were her first 
scotch caught

on the tongue, the ghost 
a flake of peat sifted--

flaked and sifted--  

the bottom of a barrel 

all raw, water I am 

lying in you now

and I let go this my final fix:

my breath.  When I fell

into you, fusty 

cellar, some vague shade closed
over my head.  It was a sloe 
I couldn't open

my eyes in.  I couldn't,

not at first, touch

the dry side

of your spine.  

And heavy, 

I was water, I was water to your 
rock, I was

barefoot

on the filmy floor

of your  lonesome stones standing...

When it’s finally black dark, when finally the air

in my lungs flutters, 

I don’t want to give  

you my last flask

of gas.  I puff.  I knock

against all the other holders
and puffers: arms and legs and eyes
that squint

into the one or two rails of light.

They're like stairs you know? and

I’m knocked, again

and again.  

                                   Until finally.

Finally.

Finally

I am tired.      

So what if I don’t have enough.

So what when I let the last of me out into you…

So what when I drop off of my cliff of lung…

So what when my jaw shuts

and locks her bulk-head door…

the shimmer goes out

            (and it goes out

                        completely)

I think: this is

            dying

            this must be dying

            this different liquid I’m in

            is dying is drowning is dying

            is suffocating dying

and I’m the last living

thing in this wet world.  After

the nail-digging, after the lips in a furious kiss,

after the stiff grip,

the last surge of this gas hiss

you are all I have

left.  I’m letting me get blue and balloon true,

into my own I’m getting gone.

Into my own I’m simply gone across the bridge.

No one has to tell me me what to do.  
But you know what?
I've known this.  

I know this like it’s habit.  I’m doing it
like I should.

I doing it exactly.   
I'm kinder, yes, than you.

Afterwards: excerpts on a marriage

Afterwards: 
excerpts on a marriage: 

They stood, their clothes flapping...

             Glass floats covered with...

The bones of seabirds.

At the tide

line ...

                   the ribs of fishes in their millions ...

along the shore as far as the ...

                  isocline of death...one vast salt sepulcher.  

                                                The Road

                                                Cormac McCarthy

the words he’ll never speak keep coming:

a rising/falling bay whose only know is to push to pull

push and pull: the way he, a man went in-

to a woman his wife a woman his wife going into a woman

her lover going into him man going into another man.   

but not like that. ok maybe like that.

maybe a little.  but only because of the salt.

he decides it’s only because of the salt in his sweat.  and maybe

the salt in the wind.

yes maybe,

because wind never stops

talking, not this wind.  he thinks maybe sex can get it to stop

stinging.  after the accident he'd put his mouth against a drain-

spout so green with detritus it was almost suicide.  an ancient

accent, the gurgle of his latent atonement,

a something he’d want to put his mouth against

again and again, the drainpipe draining

down his throat in words and words and words that keep

coming up her spine where he used to be each night

he knew her, his nipple against hers sometimes or from behind

the way he’d sneak up and invite himself

in and she never said no before because maybe

one day he’d be right where he is now and she’d be right

where she is now and no one would

want to touch him. no one.  no one would want

or even care to hear the faint

radio of a word rubbing against another word

and another and then space space       space

as wide as a Dostoyevsky page in the book

about the Inquisitor, as bound as the spine

of that book as generous and needed and consensual as

sex: the words he’d never read never even seen

and certainly never heard.  he watches her mouth

them. she spits

them into the palm of her hand when she kneads

bread, pinches them when she makes tea

when she bakes cakes.  she seasons meat

with them and eats and drinks and throws them

at the tide clock not ever looking at the empty

chair, not needing to,

and some of him having gone out and she after

so many other shes and hes (though never

as good as him and never as ready and caring)

gets ready too, gets ready after all

these years a thin now childless wife

to close her book.

Grappling Hooks and Where to Heave Them

Grappling Hooks and Where to Heave Them

In what direction did lost men veer?

                                    Cormac McCarthy

                                    The Road

once they’re steady enough

in the sway the occasional calm

                        wave

they aim straight         

           

                        through their own mind

they’re left weighing

the throw,

                        going cold,

                        motionless as rust

or right

                        into the wide kite

                        of the sky

                        and the broken glass-coated string,

                        is blood

up the cheek

down through the grass,

the broken lily pads

through through to the bottom

                       

                       

but there is no bottom

only

fathom

un-

fathom

fathom

un

fathom

Abruption

Abruption

I.

We need to believe it’s swift, a quick stiff give,

and deliverance.  When the us, what’s been cut

from blood and bone, is

breath finally and at last gone.  And the severed?

In a blanket or on a lake bottom, all
the while, (though  

who thinks of this

during the search)

casually, someone across town’s

throwing out or pouring out

or skinning out, fish or chicken

or the last of last fall’s last turnip.

II.

So it's here where air or water is
inhaled, where the boat it- 

self is.   All that drifts

in it is. : feather or shit, or breast-

tipped shimmer.

And however long

or brief he/she/we, in this virgin urge 

this impromptu chrysalis, when it unzips, when

itself's without to go into an air so genuinely

domestic, the curious

first lick their quivering lip. 

III. 

They're newborn, they're wind and tongue 
dry, a fawn in the alders

and the swamp's a scopic jaw.  Even the rigid

are soon enough to trust, all their

caution spots fading in the windy trees.

Up and sprung now,

they're free.  In the crucible of rendered echos
their dying has reduced them,

reduced them to here and now and not one

of the dead.  The spectators are the fractured ones.

And soon the twelve will be prayer.

And soon their hidden heads 

are the cusp of night, thin pins

of light only their abruption

could have nicked.  

IV.

And then, because here they are

dead and will remain dead, their mothers knit:

            while uncle’s fingers and toes go black,

            too long in the Fundy gusts.

            while spring pigs are lowered 
            to become the boiling oil…

            while their father's thumbs,

            hooked through

            the overalls straps and hang

            like the trapped rabbits in winter,

            tacked to the back shed. 

            They are supple until they’re skun, 
            until the pink beneath bleaches bare and hoary  

            pimpled after the two three four minute float

            and head or feet, it doesn’t matter which,

            first go under, then go all the way

            under until finally their silk life is dry and wide, too wide

           and they try the wet sky and fly.  

Shadow

Shadow

Golden chalice, good to house a god.  Please

            don’t tell me how the story ends.

                                                Cormac McCarthy

                                                The Road

Aside from his skin, and how it puckered

            and faded like the worn wool of winter,

And his fair hair a curled periwinkle

            in the sink two or three times

a year.  Aside from the first shirt and short

            pants I made his second spring

and how perfect they slid, straight

            to the knee and never further (aside

from saving each mistake even with the rising

            cost of fabric) it’s his shadow, his constant

shadow I miss  the most.  Because it was still

            in the room when he’d stepped briefly out,

it hinged him to the floor the wall…and even

            though his straight- from- play tang

lolled, or his just from mass resin or his cold

            soapy bath...how I’d walk through and it would be

on me and in me, his evanescent smell.

            Too soon ruined and spent.  And that shadow.

I’d step on it and we’d feel no crick or misery

            while I watched it slide across the kitchen

or the porch or the lawn or the sidewalk

            or the church isle or the grocery

isle, or how the ceiling or the sun at once

            possessed him and grew him bigger

or smaller than I ever could, and how, all at once, this flat

            lid has taken even that, has made him   

lightless.  The floor.  The wall.  The furrows

            and the kerfs.  Now I smell shadows

sitting here, clutching his cassock

            to my nose in the dusky balm of his empty bed-

room.

The First Undertaking

The First Undertaking

 ‘Twas lighter – to be Blind –

                                    Emily Dickinson

I became an Atlas cupping their final world,

and that office phone, arms wide and high

to cradle the length between my ear and lip, it

became, after an afternoon with my chin and grip,

a new bone in my cheek.  Each long distance call I wanted

quiet, I wanted another night, I wanted to haul

the chord out of the wall I wanted my own pine,

my own hammer and nails and innocent white

paint…

and who,  answering, who wasn’t stunned – listen:

                                                yes twelve white caskets

                                                yes that’s what I said

           

                                                you only have three

                                                in stock?  Jesus I need

                                                twelve, yes that’s what I said.       

                                                Can I pick them up? No

                                                I have twelve children to get…

                                                Please can you send them?

                                                What’s the number to another

                                                parlor?  Listen let me get a pen

                                                Oh Christ I dropped the ink

                                                bottle, please sorry hold on hold on hold on…

                                                nine yes nine what? please

                                                yes white yes children yes ages

                                                eight to sixteen please you have two

                                                and who you say…a number yes

                                                please yes Lubec right away

                                                four hours  drive? – listen quick

                                                yes one I need one now

                                                ten year old I’ve been phoning

                                                all afternoon -  I’ll send someone

                                                thank you yes they’ll be there

                                                A shame a terrible shame yes thank you

                                                what’s that?  Who should you send

                                                the bill to?

What the Mothers Do

What the Mothers Do While the Boats Drift and the Men Cast and Pull

“Have you any news of my boy Jack?”

                                                Rudyard Kipling

On waiting for the news— all the grit and sip of liquid dignity,

anything for the bearing 
up.

And what but the draw and bulge of such bellows as lungs

their once was confidence as much on the sail as on the wrap ‘round

the mast when sails weren’t anymore 
necessary, their right tight fold and knot loose when this wind,

this rouge-cheeked, rogue wind

billowed any, all, full cloth from pole

to hold.  Best stay calm but how to know? (though when

                                                                        is

                                                                        never

                                                                        in

                                                                        the crow’s

                                                                        nest)

We’re our own captain in this wind by Jesus.  And our list, our tip and groan, our grip

of the rope wound round and through is what cousins us

when it grows full length across the beam, as some medieval

liturgy of a Good Friday three in the afternoon rent,

what wind, what shoals,

what open water, what scraped, broke open keel, the feel (and the tongue’s

                                                                                                her only

                                                                                                 muscled compass

                                                                                                and others sooth : what, dear

                                                                                                            and who)

Oh lung for a lung.  Oh, wind or doldrum, to turn her wait into a way when each,

what they’ll speak, when they find her daughter on bottom, what they speak will

puncture her ever every, never to come again to a breath of ease.